Dvd Burning struggle

I uploaded some home video to imovie hd. I entered a blank dvd and went through the burn process. Now that I try to play it on a dvd player I get an error. What did I do wrong and how can I work this out?

Do I need to put the files into Idvd before I burn it?

Yes: iDVD will take your .dv formatted video and turn it into something a regular DVD player can read.

Click 'share'->'iDVD' in iMovie, and it will generate an iDVD project and automatically import the movie to iDVD for you.

Then, customize the menu and hit burn. It will take a few hours to convert the movie and then burns it to DVD.

If this still isn't working, try different media. Some players won't accept burnt
'DVD+R' discs, whilst others won't accept certain DVD-R discs. Try the other type and / or a different brand.

how long will it take to convert? It is 4.4 megs and its been going for 3 hours now.

It can take a while to convert, depends how large it is and how fast your computer is.
Do you 4.4 gigs? If it's 4.4 gigs of video it may take a while to convert.

Put it this way: If I was burning half an hour of video on my iBook G4, I would leave it to run overnight...

then again it also depends on what machine you have, how much ram, and what other apps are you running at the same time.