Thanks for the suggestion, and of course for your work on the Revisited Edition(s)! Much humbleness to have my first post here responded to by Adywan himself :)

I used k3b (linux) to burn the image, using the settings and media as above.

Just tried a couple more things: the ISO plays fine mounted or directly, using VLC. The burned disc plays OK in the drive (perhaps I was imagining the stutter before), and it played through twice on by standalone player without the above symptoms, but then reverted again. It also managed to skip from chapter 43 back to chapter 1, so I'm thinking either bad burn and / or bad DVD player, since it's not the first time it's done some weird stuff like this on other discs.

I suspect the black and white, which is only a momentary flicker along with the vertical rolling, relates more a bad burn / player than to an NTSC/PAL problem.

I'm downloading the DVD9 PAL version at this moment, and will burn that to a high quality (verbatim) DL and report back.

Thanks again, Adywan.