I have an .avi file that I’d rather watch on my DVD player. What’s good (preferably free) to take .avi file and create a VCD?
(I don’t have a DVD burner)
VCD should play on DVD player, right?
Depends on the player. Do you have another VCD you could test it with?
Depends on the DVD player. Some will/some won’t. But it’s cheap to find out. 
I don’t know about free, but by far the easiest way is with Toast. With it you pretty much just tell it what you want and it completely handles the transcode and burning.
OTOH, I’m sure there are free utils. I’ve been studying up in a major way to get my homebrew direct-to-the-media-server TiVo replacement going, and I’m pretty sure I could do it with freebie Linux tools – which tells me someone’s probably thrown something together. Just beware that bad transcode = ugly video. 
thank you, all!