[spuggy]

Probably encountering a buffering issue whereby the audio is arriving too late for the video cell and getting dropped/delayed. Or the software might be generating GOP cells that aren't properly closed, or are too long. Or the video bitrate of the generated stream is too high for your DVD player (or for the media) and it's barfing. Or almost anything, really...

Does the DVD play OK on the computer itself with your software DVD player, or does it show the same sync problem? This could help isolate your problem to either the mastering process or your set top player itself...

Strangely, many cheap DVD set top players are much more resilient than their brand name counterparts, and often seem to play anything they can understand, and the published specifications can go hang. "Brand name" DVD players seem to be a lot more picky and fussy.

I pretty much think Nero - like most Windoze tools - sucks, and never use it for anything more than backing-up directories/files or maybe burning a pre-mastered ISO image.

Broken MPEG streams can be very difficult - or practically impossible - to repair. I've played with some streams that were damaged by frame-editing software (e.g. to remove commercials). Unless you really want to know what MPEG-2 I, B & P frames are and the difference between a closed and an open GOP - and then puzzle out what (possibly limited) subset of the DVD specification your DVD player will accept - I suggest you find another approach...

If you really want the show badly, one approach I've had some success with is to remove all encapsulation (e.g. the AVI container itself) by rendering the video to a raw YUV image stream (HUGE!) and the audio to a raw PCM stream and re-encode and re-multiplex it to MPEG-2 video stream with AAC/AC-3 audio (as MPEG audio is only legal for PAL DVDs, according to the specification) with software that lets you access the nuts'n'bolts of what's going on under the covers (like VBV buffer size in the multiplexed stream(s), audio offset delays etc.). If done correctly, you'll end up with an MPEG system container with blank DVD VOBU's inserted, and you can then author it into a DVD. Lot of learning, lot of work, lot of disk space, lot of CPU.

I used to do this kind of thing on Unix with mplayer/ffmpeg/avidemux/mplex/DVDauthor. There are Windoze versions of at least some of these tools, but it's a learning cliff and the NTFS 4GB file limit will bite you within about 30 seconds of rendering YUV streams, sorry. Did I mention YUV streams were very large? A YUV stream is a series of full-size DVD (720x480) image frames with no compression at all, you'll certainly want full (e.g. 24 bit) color, and it's 29.97 frames per second...

I guess the short answer is that you'd probably be a lot happier buying a hardware DVD recorder for $60, plugging the S-Video output of your graphics card into the input and playing the episode on your computer via Winamp, VLC or mplayer - whatever works for you - hitting record manually and going off to do something else for an hour.