Originally Posted by Jim_Gunn

A DVD does not usually have enough storage to hold the contents of a mini-DV tape at full DV resolution. And even if it did, it's not a good idea anyway if you are archiving your footage for long term storage. Tapes are better storage since they are quite robust and long lasting.

If instead you want to put the contents of a mini-DV tape on a DVD for people to watch, then that is a whole different question. In that case you have to capture the tapes to a hard drive as AVI, then edit and then encode to mpeg-2 and burn a master disk, possibly with menus, graphics etc, in a process called DVD authoring.