I believe you tried to burn it as DVD or VCD. Burn it as data (ISO).

Encoding is the process of changing the format of your movie (if you downloaded from p2p usually DIVX/XVID or mpg) to the DVD format. Depending on the processing power/RAM/length of the movie and whether you are trying to join multiple files in one stream, it can take anywhere from 1 hr to 24 hr. This will be most of the time playable in normal dvd players. However if you just want to back them up, you should create a data disc instead and simply add files to it using explorer. Also there are players which can directly play divX/XVID encoded files. Most of them have troubles with soft subs though. Cheers

thank you guys. the movies are in divx formats as u said bathboy. i do have a cd burner but not a dvd burner in my desktop. could that be the reason why i m not being able to burn the cds?? i m trying to burn the cds as normal VCDS and not as DVDS. the blank cd i m using is like any other normal cd but not a dvd. further suggestions would be appreciated.

Put them in the stove... simple... Kidding.

Nero is one of the useless software when it comes to encoding the video. I gather from your posts that you have video files in DivX format and you want to burn them in the CD so that you can watch them as VCD or SVCD. Depending upon the length of the movie the Nero will take 1-3 hours just to convert the avi files to proper MPG-VCD format. If you want to speed the things up, forget Nero. Use Nero only for what it does the best. That is to BURN cds. Use other software to encode your DivX files to MPG-VCD format and then use Nero just to burn the cd. The best software you can use is SUPER © and you can get it free at http://www.erightsoft.net/SUPER.html . The time also depends upon the built of your computer. If you have the machine you are not that proud of then instead of going through all these troubles, just get an external DVD player which supports DivX encoded files. You can get it very cheap these days which actually support subtitles. Then you can just copy your movies in the cd without encoding them to MPG-VCD