having problems in converting from h.264 to avi

[the deadman]

I hav an HD 720p movie in a .mkv file.I want to convert it to avi so that i can play on my philips DVD player.I used mkvextractgui to extract audio and video from it.The video is in (V_MPEG4/ISO/AVC) format having H264 as extension.When i use avc2avi to convert the .h264 file to .avi,the resulting video becomes 20-30 minutes shorter than the original movie.The frame rate of the movie is 23.976 and i keep the same in avc2avi also.
Kindly help plzzzzzz.

Also if there r some other options plz suggest.I want the quality of the video to remain the same as much as possible.

[Baldrick]

Try latest alltoavi, I think it can handle vfr in some mkvs.

[dfisher052]

I used Convertxtodvd. It converted to a dvd format, but if all you want is to be able to play it on your dvd player then it shouldn't matter what format you end up with just as long as you can view it.

[impreza666]

do you loose the qaulity of the HD by doing all these things to convert it?