How to fit a big avi files onto a normal cd rom

[Alexia]

My question is that I have AVI video files which are too big to fit onto normal cd roms using a cd writter. I was wondering if anyone knows the best way of sorting this out, the thing is I don't really want to split the movies in half. Is there anyway that I can compress these files using some sort of programme or convert them into a smaller formate and still be able to watch the film on a dvd player. I tried converting them into a mpeg because I noticed that you can burn them as data and they still work on a dvd player, but when I did this the file became bigger than the previous avi file it once was. As I am a newbee to this I have no idea which formates are bigger or smaller etc etc.
I have read other simualr questions but they are slightly different.

[BJ_M]

you will have to recompress them with a different codec and/or a lower bit rate

[jimmalenko]

Probably the easiest way I can think of is to use AutoGK, which will allow you to set the output size to 700MB and it doesn't have too many places to confuse NOOBs.

[redwudz]

What BJ_M said. If you want to play them on a settop DVD player, you would probably have to go down to VCD quality if the file is big. If it's a 1-2 hour video, that may be all you can do. The quality will probably be low. If your player can play XVID or DIVX then you have more options.

You can use VCDEasy or TMPGEnc for VCD encoding or VirtualDub for XVID or DIVX. (With the proper codecs.)

[Krispy Kritter]

If you don't split the file into smaller pieces, then you have to reencode the file REDUCING the QUALITY as stated above.