What files can be burned to a DivX disc?

Not sure what dvd player you have, but I have a Phillips 642, which can basically play anything I throw at it - xvid, divx, mpg, whatever. You have to burn the divx file as raw data, as if you were just archiving it, assuming your dvd player works like mine does. So tell Toast to not do anything to the file - just burn it as plain data.

Have you tried simply burning a DivX file to a disc from the Finder and seeing if it plays?

i would try just grabbing the divx file and dragging it to the blank disk on your desktop (skipping Toast entirely). Burn that, and put it in your DVD player. It should work fine.

I don't know how Toast works, but it wants to convert the videos, it's burning a video disc. Just tell it to make a normal data disc and burn the .avi files as you would any other normal file.

You need to find out how to burn them as simple data files on an ISO9660-formatted disc. Some of them won't work - standalones (ie, DivX-capable DVD players) generally don't like files which have been encoded with advanced options such as Qpel, GMC, or B-frames. If you're lucky, whoever produced the files will indicate whether those features were used, or if the file is "standalone-friendly". If you're not, you've got a coaster.

I have the Philips, as well. It seems to play everything I throw at it, even though it doesn't support Qpel. I suppose most people who encode TV shows (which is almost all of the content I'm playing) aren't using that feature, luckily. Anyway, your player will play all those other formats when it sees them on a typical data disc. It doesn't do anything fancy. Specifically, as implied by some previous comments, you don't want to make the disc with an application that typically makes DVD video discs unless it knows how to make a plain ole data disc with the file on it. Many apps will be "helpful" and re-encode it to MPG for you. (Although I've been wondering, and wishing if it's not the case, that I could make a regular DVD video format disc but encode the video with xvid or whatever. That makes no sense being that it's not in spec, but, hey, the player understands that codec anyway, it'd be nice if they let us make DVDs using it.)

The DivX home players only support DivX files encoded with the home theater option.

tweebiscuit - just set the Toast DivX setting to "never encode". 99% of the avi's I download are either DivX Home Theatre encoded, or XVid and work just fine on my player. I have only hit an unplayable avi once, and that was easy to reencode externally using ffmpegx.

make a regular DVD video format disc but encode the video with xvid or whatever This isn't possible, but you can place a number (about 6CD's worth) of divx/xvid files on one (Data-mode, probably UDF 1.02) DVD-R.