Easiest DVD/Menu Software?

I need to burn a bunch of DVD's for DVD Player viewing. I have Adobe Encore but its taking forever to encode and keeps crashing.

I don't need to build complicated menu's. Maybe throw my own picture in the background and then have a list of chapters. Simple stuff.

I've used iDVD6 before and the picture was pretty bad. I went to encore which gave better results but I think my computer just isn't powerful enough to run it.

Any suggestions?

If I use MPEGstreamclip to conver to Mpeg2 to first then use Idvd will that be better?

iDVD will certainly give you the tools to create a nice menu. Toast, if you have it, will also create very basic menu's, but I'm not sure how much you can play around with what it does, I haven't tried.
I would try the conversion/iDVD route, but bear in mind, all encoding takes time.