question about DVD camcorders

[Aarre Laakso]

Brian MacWhinney wrote:
>    Please please don't record to the DVD format, if you plan to do 
> further analysis of your data.  It is a highly proprietary format.  
> Someday, we will probably be able to "crack" the code for the DVD format 
> in terms of linking to programming, but who knows when?

This is a bit off-topic, but I feel compelled to note that software to 
"crack" the DVD encoding was released in 1999 by a 15-year old Norwegian 
named Jon Johansen. The original and many other implementations are 
still widely available, although usually not in a particularly "user 
friendly" form, for legal reasons. Dave Touretzky maintains a "gallery" 
of examples at:
     http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/Gallery/index.html
and some further information at:
     http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/index.html
that together provide a fascinating case study of the both the necessity 
and the ongoing difficulty of redefining such basic notions as 
"property" and "speech" some 60 years after the dawn of the information age.

I agree with Brian: do not record your original data to DVD.

Regards,
Aarre Laakso