Windows 7 - dvds burn very slow

whenever i download a movie (legally) and burn it, it seems like it takes way longer than it should, close to an hour. I have a blu-ray burner, so i would think that regular movies would burn much faster. Does the software have anythign to do with the speed? I am just using windows dvd maker to burn it?

I don't have any Blue Ray. But it's pretty much universal that you control the burning speed through the writer application.
Check the Windows DVD maker for setting the burn speed.
Or are you talking about the whole process from dropping the movie into the DVD maker until the ready DVD comes back out?
In that case the timings seem reasonable (especially if the DVD maker has to demux and then re-encode and remux the film material)
Let's say you drop in any AVI and expect to get a standard DVD which is playable on about any DVD player
The AVI first gets demuxed (split into its Audio and Video tracks) then the videotrack gets converted to an MPEG2 file, reunited with the audio file(s) and formated into a valid DVD structure (IFO/VOB) and only after that all has been done the actual burning process takes place.Which means the total time depends on the movie's length, your computer's calculation power, amount of RAM and the quality settings for the output.
If you take all that into consideration, like I said, 1hr seems reasonable on a modern computer. On a singlecore comp I usually had times up to and over twice the movie length.

If you need more specific info or tips, try to explain as exact as possible what formats you are using and what exactly you expect to come out of it.

-DG