The compressor, ideally, will let you compress the video to a desired size, but also to a desired bit rate. The DVD disc format supports a maximum transfer rate of 9.8 Megabites per second, but at that rate only approximately an hour of video will fit on a 4.7 Gigabyte disc. Much of a movie can be compressed at a much lower rate, though you will want to increase this rate for some scenes. Ideally you should be able to easily go in and adjust the transfer rate for a sequence and the compressor will recompress this for you. I don't think that the DVD recorder writes CD format discs, but I'm not certain.
Laser discs are completely different beasts.
You won't find anything that will write those as well as CDs and DVDs. Check out the links above, particularly Sonic Solutions, who has a very complete tool. They do play regular DVDs, though may not come with the MPEG decoder to play the video discs. You could put a DVD-Video file on one of these discs, and play it, but you still need an MPEG2 decompressor to do it. And to create a video file you will need authoring software to create such a file.