As for the conversion process, I've heard a lot of good things about HDTV2toMPEG2 (http://www.midwinter.com/~bcooley/). Apparantly it can make a playable, burnable output file in minutes. Let me know what you think of this idea and I can get started on more special features for the DVD.
PS, you might want to add some color saturation to the movie. It was highly uncolorful when it was broadcast on HDTV and can use a little boost in color.