I have a few old family video clips that I want to pop onto a DVD to play in a standard DVD player (damned people that don't have Divx, ). I don't want to fork out for Nero or Roxio are there any half decent free legal programs out there?

Windows DVD Maker? It's on both Vista and Windows 7.

Nero 9 Lite - its free and can be found here http://download.cnet.com/Nero-9-Lite/30 ... 64576.html

What format are the existing clips in?

Unfortunately the codec used for DVD is licensed rather than open source, so there are few free and legal programs I know of that will burn DVD video directly from avi or similar video clips.

I've not tried it myself, but here's a guide using DVDflick:
http://www.digital-digest.com/articles/ ... page1.html

Nero 9 lite does not support DVD video. However, Nero 10 full has a 15 day trial: http://www.nero.com/eng/downloads-nero10-trial.php

Another thing you might check; a lot of old DVD players will actually play mpeg1 files burned directly to a CD with no special formatting. This might be a cheap and easy alternative.

you could tryCDBURNERXP

its free and a very capable bit of burning software

but if you need to convert the files to dvd then there is a guide here scroll down a bit to get to the how to