For a long time, I have not seen major issues with hooking up DVD burners to FreeBSD. Say, 10 years ago it was tricky. Modern drives have already standards compliant interface so connecting the drive will be painless. There is the issue with using it, which FreeBSD does not actually do for writing -- it is all dependent on the application you use for writing and DVD burners are different.
I have had good experience with Plextor drives in the past. My last one however just died of too much use, it could no longer write to any media. Until then, as a colleague of mine would say "it will write properly even to a brick!". At that time, I was very vary to buy any new drive, as Plextor did not have good new model, but.. eventually just went to the shop and purchased what they had there --- some cheap ASUS drive. To my surprise, no issues whatever (except it always says it's cable is not 80 pin
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I have also had strange issues with one SONY drive in the past. While it would happily write the media, reading it would almost always produce errors. The media was fine, just the drive was reading bad data -- other drives would read that same disk ok. So make sure you test your new drive in different usage scenarios before trusting it with your data.
Make sure you get a new drive, not used one because all DVD writers have (very) limited lifespan of the writing laser -- if you need to write lots of disks, prepare to replace the drive from time to time.
