Converting an MPG data file burned to disc to a burned "video disc" for set-top DVD players I've inherited some (12) DVD recordings of events for our organization that were burned to disc as data, instead of as a video disc.

I'm looking to take a 16:9 MPG video from these DVDs and burn it back to DVD in video format. Unfortunately I'm having problems with it. It seems to be losing its 16:9 dimension/ratio whenever I do a conversion from the very little amount of knowledge that I have with the applications at my disposal. I'm not too knowledgeable about video production software.

I have Windows Live Movie Maker, Windows Live DVD Maker, and Adobe Premiere Pro and Encore CS5 (part of CS5 Master Collection).

When I tried Encore, it converted (or read as?) the video to 728x480 (3:2) on import even though the settings seem to show "Don't Transcode" and DVD Maker seemed to add a black border around the video regardless of what settings I had attempted (widescreen/fullscreen). Live Movie Maker was made to make the creation process easy, so its settings are rather lacking, and I understand that - it just happened to be what I had on hand. I unfortunately don't have a lot of experience with video products.

Does anyone have any suggestions on solutions to run the conversion? Points for fewer steps and ease-of-use, but with "decent" quality conversion.

I have no additional budget for this task.
Encore should work fine for your purposes.  When you look at the original source, what is the resolution?  Is it still 728 by 480?  Most likely the original image is using oblong pixels to make a 16:9 image with a non 16:9 resolution.  This is fairly typical and is called Anamorphic Widescreen.  The 16:9 image is compressed to a 4:3 size (720 by 480 is a typical .9 pixel compressed NTSC 4:3 image.)

When recording it to a DVD, you want to make sure that it is encoding it as an Anamorphic wide screen so that the DVD player that plays it back knows that it should scale it out to 16:9.  Your other option is to letterbox the original to a 4:3 size with black bars on the top and bottom.

I don't have Encore in front of me at the moment, but if you can't find the setting for anamorphic widescreen, I can look it up when I get home and let you know.