Regardless, my point being that the TV almost always switches back and forth during a single DVD, which makes me that much more pissed at the AVIA folks for claiming that they couldn't do the same thing.

Yeah, you're right. My father's player will take a widescreen DVD I've authored, and you can see it adjusting to the proper ratio.

I would have mentioned the program I use, but I thought you wanted something small and simple and (since some have suggested it), cheap. But anyway, you could do a trial of DVDlab. It's one of the few pieces of software that I've paid for at the end of a trial.

I was doing about the same thing as you for my TV. I just made a little grid graphic in PSP, turned it into a video with Premiere, saved it as a mpeg2 (though you could do this afterward), and imported it into DVDlab.