I am trying to do this same thing i.e. "create a DVD that has the date and time as subtitles". You mentioned above there you found a series of windows tools that lets you do this - can you share the details?
I have a set of Windows tools and have most of the pieces necessary for Mac except for one crucial piece.
On Windows I use the following tools. These tools are generally available from videohelp.com
1. windv: This allows you to copy the video from a firewire DV camera and write it to one or more files. I copy it as one giant file ~22GB.
2. DV sub maker: This scans the DV file (.avi on Windows). It creates a subtitle file that states what text should appear at what time interval in the file. You can tell it to create subtitles from the date and time in various formats.
3. DVDAuthorGUI: This is a front end onto a bunch of open source and freeware tools. It handle encoding the video, can take the subtitle file as input and create a DVD image. It also has much fancier capabilities to create nicer DVD menus, but I've never figure it out. The DVDs I create have no menus. Just one big video with subtitles.
I also wrote a Java utility to scan the subtitle file and come up with chapter markers every once in a while which I also input into DVD author GUI.
On the Mac I ended up finding most of the pieces.
1. As an equivalent to WinDV, you can use iMovie. Capture the file with or without scene breaks. It creates a bunch of ".dv" files. These file contain the raw DV data from the camera without a header. If you break it up by scene, you can re-create a single large file with a simple unix command, "cat *.dv > big.dv". That concatenates all the *.dv files in order into a single file, big.dv.
2. I never found an equivalent to DV submaker. This was the critical piece. Turns out I spent a good bit of time messing around and ended up writing my own which actually does work. Its pretty neat, its able to display the video as it goes and shows you the timestamp its found for it. It writes out the subtitle file in a fixed format. More about this later.
3. The Windows DVDAuthorGUI program is a front end to a bunch of open source tools, most of which run on Mac OS. You can use the command line tools which are very powerful, and or you can use "ffmpegx" as a front end to them. Even if you want to use the command line tools, its best to get ffmpegx because it bundles them in. Otherwise you have to hunt around for each individual tool.
I was pretty happy when I got my own equivalent to DVSubMaker working. But I never really finalized or cleaned it up. I toyed with the idea of making it available but I have other things taking my time. In the meanwhile, I gave up dealing with video. I bought an otherwise horrendous old Philips DVD recorder which can record from a DV camera straight to DVD real time with subtitles. I had spent years messing with programs, just wasn't worth it anymore.
In the meanwhile, I also ended up buying a pretty cheap ($100) but very nice Fuji still camera which also does a surprisingly decent job of video, 640x480 30fps with audio. The files come out much smaller. Already broken out by scene. Generally easier to deal with. I like having video and stills mixed together at an event, although neither iMovie nor iPhoto handle the combination well.
In summary, I figured out several ways to make it work, but it was still too much work and I've switch to a Fuji still camera with video support.
Good luck
