help a noobie in a brave new world

[purity]

heya evryone, before i start i wish to say how happy i am to have found such a wonderfull place to learn.

what i am trying to find out is, which codec or collection of codecs would give me the best quality when encodeing my movies for dvd.

ive used some programs before to convert my AVI and MPG files into dvd standard and i have always had a problem of when the scene involves darkness the image sorta pixelates.

I'm not sure if thats the right word what i mean is that the black alters to a light shade of gray and kinda distorts the whole black area of the screen.

i assume that it is the codec that is responsible for the video quality aswell as the sound quality.

my system specs are:

AMD AM2+ X2 @2.21
2 GB System Ram
250 GB HDD
EVGA Nvidia 88GTS 312mb Graphics card

Thanks,

purity

[MilesAhead]

I assume you're running Windows? What version?

[admin]

And also which software titles have you been using?