Much Success with TiVo to DVD-R (Score 5, Interesting)

Though I don't know that anyone can speak authoritatively, I can speak from my personal experience in doing exactly what you're talking about for about a year now (e.g. downloading from TiVo, adjusting MPEG headers to DVD spec and burning DVD's after manipulation with DVD StudioPro).

In order to make this past Christmas a successful one, I wanted to make sure that the "special edition" DVDs I was making for family members were as compatible as possible.

After extensive reading, some experimenting and some real-life experience (both successful and less-than) I can say the following:

A DVD-R burned on high quality media (e.g. 2X Maxell - this brand has the best compatibility that I have read about and personally experienced) in the proper DVD spec (I stick with 1.0 or 1.1) will work on MOST players, including at least one "first generation" Pioneer set-top player.

In my experience, after testing various conditions on a number of set-top players, it is the media that makes the most difference in compatibility rather than anything else. As long as your MPEG video stream is spec (or corrected) and your audio is also at spec I think you'll be good to go.

BTW I do all this via BSD (Mac OS X) and Linux (TiVo) over a WLAN.