Perhaps the internet gods were grouchy before? This is a possibility that can never be wholly discounted.

For me, it went super-smoothly; I just used the download manager that comes with Opera (so, basically, I could resume if a download stopped, but no, you know, fancy stuff - and, in fact, I never needed to resume) and extracted the file, and the only confusion I had was that the final file ended up in a folder named after the first .rar file, but inside that folder was the actual proper whole file, so all was well.

And, oh, burning goes so fast when you already have the ISO file. It's magic!

Anyway, I'm glad it's working now. I'm so happy to have these vids all big and high quality.