Converting avi to VIDEO_TS with ffmpegX. Image is stretched.

[Danteism]

I'm fairly new to video conversion and a complete layman so be gentle.

While I've successfully done a few dozen conversions with ffmpegX, I'm having serious trouble getting a couple of avi files to DVD without them ending up all stretched out of shape.

I've tried 8 or 9 different combinations of settings and read tons of posts / tutorials here and still no luck.

Hopefully you can help me tame this beast.

I'm looking to maintain as much quality as possible without having to spend all day in conversion, so I'd like to use the ffmpeg encoder if possible. (the mpeg2enc seems to take MUCH longer whenever I try it)

I want to burn to disc so that it can be played on my tv using a regular (us) DVD player.

So, here are the details on the avi file...

When I drop it into the source window of ffmpegX 0.0.9t it says the following:

Video: mpeg4, yuv420p, 640x272, 25.00 fps
Audio: mp3, 48000 Hz, stereo, 112 kb/s

When I open in VLC to get info it shows:

Stream 0:
Codec - XVID
Stream 1:
Codec - mpga
Meta-information:
Setting - HAS_INDEX_IS_INTERLEAVED

Can someone please give me a step by step walkthrough of what steps I should use with ffmpegX to get this converted to a VIDEO_TS folder that will play on my regular dvd player?

Thanks so much in advance for your time and wisdom.

Dante
--
Maui, Hawaii

[Danteism]

Oh, and one more note...

I've used Toast to successfully convert and burn this type of avi, but the quality seemed to suffer by comparison to when I use ffmpegX.

I'm sure there must be a way to do it with ffmpegX, I'm just too dumb to figure it out without some hand holding.

[Case]

The stretching can be solved by letterboxing. Mark the Decode with QT checkbox (and keep the small Letterbox checkbox beside that checked).