I wanted to burn a folder to DVD and needed it to look exactly the way I set it up in Finder (custom background image, icon view with custom positioning), just like a lot of install media or downloadable DMGs. You could do something like this with earlier versions of Toast, but I never got it to work with OS X 10.4.x and Toast 7/8.
So I created a folder, put everything in it, hit Command-J, and tried burning it with Disk Utility and Toast 8. Since the background image and the size of the folder window got lost, I decided to give disk images a try. I used Disk Utility to create an image, put the folder content directly into it, put the folder itself into the image and so on. I even used all of the available options in Disk Utility to convert the image and did the same (image creation, conversion, etc.) within Toast.
Eventually it worked, and I had burnt a Mac-only DVD with my folder (and its custom look) on it. I put the DVD in my trusty Cube just to see if it works there, too. And guess what? It did not, the background image was not there, but still visible on my MacBook Pro where I had burnt the DVD!
Now I realized that the folder on the DVD had the same properties as the original on my Desktop. Using Command-J on it, revealed to me that its associated background image was the file residing still on my Desktop and, of course, removing this image file resulted in the same "background-less" view as on the Cube. So the trick is to also burn the background image.
Since this is not done automatically I did the following:
- Create a writable image file with Disk Utility and mount it
- Copy the folder you want to burn to the mounted image
- Create another folder on the mounted image called something like bgimage containing your background image file
- Open Terminal and navigate to the image (cd /Volumes/imagename)
- Optionally make the folder invisible (mv /Volumes/imagename/bgimage /Volumes/imagename/.bgimage
- Go to the now-hidden folder and open it in Finder by navigating to it (cd /Volumes/imagename/.bgimage) and then opening it (open .)
- Get the little folder icon at the top of the Finder window and add it to your sidebar via drag and drop (you'll need that in a second)
- Select the Folder on the mounted image, press Command-J, choose to select an image as background. In the appearing dialogue, click on the sidebar alias of the hidden folder (you can't just navigate to hidden folders, hence the prior step with the sidebar alias)
- Resize your Finder window if neccessary
- Use Disk Utility to convert the image to read-only
- Burn the image (I used Toast 8 for that by choosing Copy and then Image file, but Disk Utility should work, too).

