You're completely wrong. You cannot play DVDs from an external drive, technically. You CAN burn them with any iLife program (minus iDVD on a G3 system, which I have). I can burn DVDs freely, just not with my internal drive. I have purchased a LaCie firewire DVD burner.
Actually, I used a program edit before. After 10.3.6, I lost the ability to use DVD Player with my external drive. Does anybody have a link to a more current "edit"?