Help with burning to DVD and editing

Please let me know if this is the wrong forum and which is the correct one. Thanks.

When I burn to my Sony DVD player on DVD-R, it won't play in my DVD player, just on a computer. It worked once or twice, but I don't know what I'm doing wrong. I've burned as AVI and also MPG2. I've got many software packages for editing and burning and have tried a number of them. While I enjoy editing the DVD that I grab from my camera (Panasonic gs35), if I can just get it off the camera in whole and onto a DVD, that would be fine for now. The only program I've found that does that is neoDVD, but it only wants a DVD+R.

Also, when I capture from Vegas VideoCapture, I cannot get the peaks to normalize. But when I capture from MovieMaker and then edit in Vegas, it works fine.

Also, isn't there any way to speed up the process???? It takes forever to capture and then to burn.

I'm starting to wish I'd bought a DVD camcorder instead of mini-DV.

I'm pretty new to all this, so I appreciate all the help I can get.

Susan