reddragdiva | Some bleak teutonic hole, six feet under with a snap-frozen soul.

The cheap DVD-R shop is Samrana, 74 Hoe Street, Walthamstow E17 4PG. I recommend them highly.

It's just as well the DVDs were 18p each, because I've gotten two coasters so far. Not bad media, but because:

Mac OS X burn folders contain links to the files, not the files themselves; but the burn folder function is too dumb to understand that network drives aren't as instant as local hard disks. (It's probably just Samba on the FreeBSD 5.4 box being shitty, but it takes about fifteen seconds to start a transfer to the Mac smoothly. This is really annoying in VLC.)
Mac OS X gets upset if you try to read a file whose name contains an umlauted U over Samba.

If a file or folder's name contains "ü" or "Ü", Mac OS X gets upset and says you don't have permission to read the file. And you then come up with an error message the exercises Apple's legendary user-friendliness to its utmost:

The operation cannot be completed because one or more required items cannot be found.
(Error code -43).

Could not retrieve information for "<unable to get file path>" (-43)

There's a similarly helpful message if Samba is hiccupping and it can't get the file RIGHT NOW, because maintaining a buffer is too hard, and you get a coaster.

I'm now trying what burn folders I can get to work, and making ISOs on the FreeBSD box to copy over to the Mac for burning. This takes only two hours for each one on 10Mbit Ethernet. I can't tell you how pleased I am.

Update: So, that ISO made a DVD-ROM with a readable directory structure but unreadable files. I'm now making tarballs to send over. Actually, I'm now going to bed.