[Joe Forster/STA]

Yes, to burn non-DVD material in DVD format (plain MPEG-2 is not DVD!), you need an authoring software. As for which one, everyone you might ask will advise a different one; but, if you already have Nero, try Nero VisionExpress - it will not give you the best target quality - if it does any conversion on the video - but it's, at least, easy to use.

I don't know what Nero did to your file. If you burnt it as a plain MPEG-2 video file onto a data DVD, you should play it with the usual media player and should get audio, too. If you converted it to DVD format - or Nero did it for you -, something might have happenned to it. (If possible, don't use wizards - and other express ways - but read the manuals and understand what you're doing or what you're telling the software to do!) To test media files, try MPlayer which can play anything and in a very compatible way - it might play the audio while your media player or DVD player doesn't.