I finally managed to create video DVDs under Debian a few weeks back. Ironically they look better than the programs I spent hundreds on in Windows and don't suffer any audio lag. First, there's a large listing of these tools under
http://www.videohelp.com/tools?s=23#23 . Every tool you could need is here, but the most important ones are command-line only and you need to work to find good guis for them. If you're still using Debian add the lines
ftp://ftp.nerim.net/debian-marillat/ stable main
ftp://ftp.nerim.net/debian-marillat/ testing main
ftp://ftp.nerim.net/debian-marillat/ unstable main
to your /etc/apt/sources.list file. I think you may also need the non-us repository if you didn't already add that. Many of these programs are available in this repository, I've never been able to successfully compile them otherwise. 'apt-get install avidemux qdvdauthor' will install these two GUI tools along with their dependencies and the commandline tools.
If you've got these tools with their dependencies properly installed, the rest is easy. First run avidemux and open the video you need to convert to dvd format (DVD Mpeg2). Click 'video codec' and select DVD. If you select 'configure codec' you can change the bitrate to get different file sizes; a two-pass encoding lets you determine the approximate file size (not including audio, that's usually a few hundred megabytes more). Select audio codec and set it to either 'ffmpeg mpeg audio' or 'ffmpeg ac3 2 channel'. Click the 'video process' and 'audio process' buttons down. You may also want to try the 'video filter' button which has an option to resize to DVD res but I haven't found this necessary since I think the other tools can take care of this at a later step. Click file-> save->save as DVD PS and save as movie.mpg or something. Wait four hours or so (depends on the video file, your computer, etc.)
You've now got a DVD-format MPEG file but you need to generate the DVD filestructure. the commandline tool dvdauthor takes care of this but a GUI is a heck of a lot easier. Run qdvdauthor, which is still in early stages but does a decent job of making DVDs with menus. Add your converted movie file(s) in the panel on the left. You can add images in the frame on the right, right-click and define as button, which will let you make a button to play the movie. I'm not very familiar with qdvdauthor yet but I'm sure you could make a pretty decent DVD with it, other tools like DVDStyler may work too. Be sure to run tools->setup to tell qdvdauthor where to save the DVD to (on the hard drive) and where all the commandline tools are. Click the little DVD icon to make the DVD. Take a look over the output that its sending to the various tools before you make the DVD. I think it may be fixed by now, but the first time i used it messed up some filenames (the file outputted by one tool didn't quite match the one inputted into the next tool.) If all goes well creating the DVD should take a couple of minutes. You can then use k3b (which has an option to burn DVD if you have the DVD filestructure already set up) to copy this to a DVD. BTW, check k3b's setup to make sure it has all the tools for burning DVDs if you haven't burnt any yet. Hope this helps!
