My new LaCie DVD external DVD burner arrived yesterday.
Oddly enough, their software installer for OSX just wouldn’t work — it would tell me that I didn’t have permission to install their software, even if I was running it as root. I called their tech support who had me manually copy one file under /Library, and then life was good.
iDVD doesn’t support this drive (it apparently only supports the Mac SuperDrive), but at least I can use iDVD to burn to an image file and then use Disk Utility to burn to this DVD drive, which is definitely an improvement over before (where I had to convert the .img to be an ISO image and then copy it to a Windoze machine to burn it). So it’s still not optimal, but it’s good enough for me.