Players will play certain formats of movies. What format did you use?
My Sony Blu-ray will not play .avi, but my Toshiba DVD player will. DVD-RW can be flaky in some players. You need to "finalize" the disk.
Won't happen. The old TV has analog inputs. The Blu-ray and Direct TV has digital outputs. There may be some converter for digital to analog but it will not be cheap. Probably less expensive to buy a new flat screen TV with the inputs you need.