Whilst I am burning a DVD project on Nero Startsmart containing video
files .avi and .mpg, (what I'm about to explain can happen at
different times while burning project onto a disc) a message pops up
telling me: "Unable to prepare data for recording; Transcoding of Videos Failed"

I have no idea what has happened, and looked on the projects log file
and it came up with this information:

INFORMATION:
cause: 23 (bad_format)
source: _DVDProcessor
description: Invalid Packets found in VOBU

DumpExceptionInformation(): Caught SEH Exception 0xe06d7363 during
encoding

ERROR:
cause: 128 (nmc_processing_exception)
source: _VOBS:oGuardedProcessing ()
description: Exception during encoding

I have no idea what this info means!!!
If someone could advise me on what I could do to correct this problem
as it happens everytime I burn a DVD project onto a disc, or tell me
of any free downloadable DVD burning software (free of viruses) that
would help me make my disc I would be very grateful.

Answers ASAP. Thanks for your help in advance

Try completely uninstalling Nero using their Clean Tools. Reboot and reinstall without the InCD software. Try doing a new transcode. If it breaks again, apply this patch and try again.

Some other ideas are:

• See if you can successfully burn a much smaller video (around 10-20MBs) to the disk.
• Try lowering the burn speed.

What are your system specs (CPU, RAM (type and size), available harddrive space, DVD burner specs, and type of media you are trying to burn)?