How can I burn a dvd on my Macbook Pro to play on a DVD player?

I have a .avi file I want to burn to a DVD-R to play on a dvd player and an xbox 360. I tried to use the program Burn to convert the file then burn it, but it when I inserted the disc into my dvd player it said there's a 'disc error'. I then tried to play it my computer. The DVD player on my mac opened up but nothing played. I even made the program encode in MPEG2 because I read that the DVD player reads MPEG2 file formats from the DVD. Can anyone help me figure what I'm doing wrong? I've all ready wasted 3 discs and I'd rather not burn through another 15 just to find out how to get it right. Thanks!