I want to do some pretty basic stuff digital video-wise. There are three things I want to do:

1) Transfer home movies (DV-AVI) to Tivo boxes via Tivo Desktop. So DV-AVI -> MPEG2 in the MyTivoRecording Folder

2) Transfer home movies to DVD. DV-AVI -> MPEG2

3) Transfer Tivo recording to DVDs.

From what I can tell I can do this with free software, but it's alot easier with some commercial software out there. The two I'm looking at are:
Nero 8
Ulead Moviestudio 11

Both under $100.

Other issues:
Right now I'm transfering the mini-DV tapes to the computer directly into MPEG2 and keeping the tapes as long time archival storage. This way I save hard drive space by not using DV-AVI files. For my purposes above, it seems to be sufficient.

For Tivo-> DVD I think I need DirectShowDump, but it doesn't seem to work in Vista. Is this true?

So, I'm looking for input, opinions, recommendations from the community. I appreciate the help.