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I've been pulling shows off my replay tv and would like to encode then and put them on to DVD for future viewings on a stand alone dvd player. Problem I had with idvd is that two 40 minute shows was the most I could put on a dvd (idvd apparently restricts total dvd length to 2 hours - irregardless of quality). So I thought about using Toast 7 to squeeze more content on a dvd. Could someone give me some encoding options for a non-hdtv (ie normal 27 inch Sony wega)

For example, if the show I an importing started as muxed mpeg2 keep it in this format or convert it to dv format?

what should I set the average bit rate to ? maximum bit rate?

You have no options. MPEG-2 (or 1) is the only video format in the DVD spec. That's why when you buy TV shows on DVD they rarely include more than 2 hours or so (of the show) on each disc.

Do you have a dual layer burner?

I apologize I was not clear in my question. I know that MPEG is my only option but when I transfer the movie to my desktop it is in mpeg -2 muxed. I know that there will be a conversion of this format when the dvd is made to mpeg. But one of my questions was that if I convert the mpeg-2 muxed to another format such as dv or h264 will I limit the quality loss prior to dvd encoding.

the second question and perhaps more important of the two is Toast has encoder options when making a dvd an "average bit rate option and a maximum bit rate "option. by default they are set to 4 and 8 Mbps respectively. Are these settings too high for a standard definition set?

Part 1. MPEG-2 is all that's allowed. You can of course convert from MPEG-2 to DV or MPEG-4, only to convert back to MPEG-2, but there is absolutely no reason to do this. It is guaranteed to reduce the quality of your video, and it is guaranteed not to have any other benefit. This is a general rule of video encoding: avoid unnecessary lossy conversions. They are the biggest thing that will introduce noise and signal loss. The only other information that applies in this case is that if you use DV-NTSC, you automatically lose half your color data, because MPEG-2 is 4:2:0 and DV-NTSC is 4:1:1 (why? who knows. PAL doesn't have this problem, but American DVDs are not PAL).

Part 2. There is an allowed range of bitrates in the spec, I think it's 2-12 Mbps. 2 looks absolutely horrible. 4 is minimum to look "good" on TV. Use higher if you're dealing with high-motion video. But don't take my word for it. The first step for all questions of video quality is to try it yourself on a short clip and see the results first hand. Also, you mentioned a standard definition set; obviously, all the settings apply only to standard definition, none to high definition, because these settings and standards were finalized years before high-def existed. DVD hasn't changed, and it can't change, because that would break all the existing hardware DVD players.

If you really want more length, and really don't care for video quality, you can encode to VCD-spec MPEG-1, which is allowed on Video DVDs. I forget all the numbers, I'm sure Toast knows them, but it's half-frame (a quarter the resolution), and you can get about 10 hours on a DVD-5. Again, the only really good way to get more video on there is to have a dual layer burner (or blu-ray I guess).