What's the best fomate to burn DVDs?

I've been burning my own home movies and pictures onto DVD for a while now. My question is this... is there any way to put movies and pictures (slideshows) onto DVD in a better quality format than MPEG-2 ? When I put my movies back onto my Mini-DV camcoder and play it on my TV the quality is excellent, but when I burn these same movies or slideshows onto DVD the quality is somewhat less. I have all the settings, such as the Bit Rate, set as high as possible when I make a DVD. I realize that a video file is not compressed like an MPEG-2. Is there anything out here that will allow me to put my movies and slideshows onto DVD without compression, like an AVI file. Any help from someone who really knows this stuff would be appreciated. I want to start a small video editing business but am not happy with my current DVD burning abilities. Maybe someone can tell me something about these settings... MPEG-2, 24 Bits, 720 X 480, Video Data: 8000 Kbps, Sample Rate 48.000 KHZ. As far as I know these are the highest settings I can have