I'm trying a few different things right now and I got a WMV I want to burn to CD. I'm using STOIK Movie Converter to turn it into AVI, then encode AVI with TMPGEnc, as described in the guide. However, with SO MANY codecs to choose from (some of them freeze my PC, others overflow my HD), I feel I need some advice.

I've tried MS Video 1. It uses VERY little space (only like 120 megs total used), and the encoding is fast, like 3-7 frames a second even on a SLOW machine. But the quality is SERIOUSLY lacking.

I tried Brooktree YUV Raw and the other "Raw" format, and I got a 2 gig file that's less than 50% of the movie, then the file overflowed (AVI file technically cannot be > 2 gigs).

I tried the MS MPEG4 codec, but that didn't work (froze up).

Any specific recommendations on what video and audio codec to use?

Oh, and please don't tell me "uncompressed". As I said, the file ended up > 2 gigs, which is illegal for AVI.