Burning mpegs and using iso level 1 and joliet?

[oceanauk]

I've spend many months trying to encode my movies from my digital camera correctly; they're recorded at 640 x 480 30fps and will not play directly on dvd players due to this new fast frame rate. However, I managed to encode them using TMPGEnc and they would play fine. Then recently my laptop crashed and I had to do a system reformat - and since I've had numerous problems encoding and playing back. Now I've recently discovered CD Burner XP Pro which is the business and I've also discovered after many, many wasted hours, that if I copy my movies directly onto disc and burn using the iso level 1 format I don't even have to encode them and they play fine on my dvd player - just not on windows media or real player! Can't win!! Can somebody please explain any of this to me - what is the difference between iso level 1 (or 2 for that matter) and joliet? What codec do I need to play these on media play 10? Thank you if you've read to here!! Sorry this is so long winded! Jackie