A few days ago, after reading about how to burn avis to dvd on this forum, I downloaded the trial version of dvd santa (v 4.0), and, well...it works, I guess, but it took between 8 and 11 hours each to encode 3 25-minute avis (about 225 mb each, I think) that I had downloaded from limewire (kids tv programs - I don't have the specifics here as limewire is on my home computer and I'm emailing from work - my home computer is still all tied up encoding files!). So, over 20 hours to encode the files to burn to one 75-minute DVD. The actual DVD burn time was fairly short,a few minutes, and the resulting dvd played ok on my laptop (a Dell Inspiron 1000 running Windows XP) and on my home DVD player. Now I am encoding the files for a 700 mb avi, a 2-hour movie, and it's taken over 40 hours so far and still isn't done. This encoding time is ridiculous! Has anyone else ever had this problem? Is is a problem with Santa? With the demo version? Would I get better results with, say, Nero or something? Would it make a difference if I uninstalled and reinstalled Santa? I don't think it's because I've got too much junk on my hard drive, I just got rid of some rather large files and it still didn't speed things up any. And, as I say, the actual DVD burn time is pretty quick, it's just that the encoding time is ridiculous. And all the while the files are encoding I can't really do anything else on my laptop, it runs so incredibly slowly that it's faster just to check email on my cell phone. Unfortunately, I can't even search for or download any more limewire files while I'm tied up with this encoding, so it's really getting frustrating, and I'd appreciate it if anyone knows a way I can speed up this process - whether it be through a santa reinstall, use of other software, or...?

Try this one:
http://www.tmpgenc.net/e_download.html

If the cpu speed of your laptop is 1000, you can expect it to take a long time, but I would have thought not that long.

As a Rough guide on my P4 3.0 box, DVDsanta and WinAvi Video Converter will convert at about 2x playing speed (IE a 1hour clip will convert in about 30min), Tmpegenc will convert at about 2/3 playing speed (the same 1hr clip will convert in about 1hr 20min)

Try one of the other converters and see what sort of time frame you get in comparison, if it is similar, you need to be converting on a faster computer.

WinAvi Video Converter has a high speed to do the conversion.