I have a MiniDV camcorder and a new Pioneer DVR-A04 drive. I'm successfully authoring my home videos to DVD-R, and they play just fine on my Pioneer 444 standalone player.

I'm using TMPGENC Pro to encode the MPEG-2 file straight from the DV AVI file captured via Firewire (and edited using Ulead MSP 6.5). I'm not splitting the audio or anything like that. So, after it's all said and done, the audio is in the MPEG video file and sounds just fine.

When I played the disc on a friends stand-alone player, we had to tweak some settings to get it to play the MPEG audio. Doing some research after this, I find several websites claim that not all stand-alone players will work with the MPEG audio and instead require AC3 (or DD of some sort).

So my questions are:

1) How do you all deal with the audio on the movies your burn to DVD-R? What is "best practice" for the maximum compatability?
2) How do you pull the audio out of a DV AVI file and convert it to AC3? I think TMGPENC and BeSweet will do this, but I'm not 100% sure that's the best approach.
3) Once you have the AC3 audio, what tools do you use to author the DVD to include the AC3 soundtrack?

I have Windows XP, in case you recommend a software package. Right now I'm evaluating several DVD authoring programs (MyDVD which came with the drive and I don't like much, Ulead's DVD Factory & DVD Workshop). I'm open to suggestions on any software packages that works well with what I'm trying to do (DV AVI -> MPEG2).

Thanks in advance.. hopefully this didn't belong in the "Newbies" forum!