Just make sure to copy the movies to the harddrive in DV-AVI as that is the best quality, it is ~14GB per hour though.
You then need to use one of the convertor programs mentioned, I think I used WinAVI when I had a DV camera.
Why it didn't work for you is the fact you used divx2dvd which is used for converting DIVX AVI's to DVD and not DV-AVI's