I did not capture that interview. Hopefully I can explain a little more
about the format issues, or perhaps confuse it even more, as someone
might want to record something concernig wine in the future.

First, I only record video to DVD. The price of blank discs has dropped
to well under US$1 when you buy them in 100 lots, and they hold over 4
GB, while a CD video format holds well under 1 GB. Double layer discs
now used for many commercial DVD movies are now available as blanks for
burning, but they still are expensive. You can get 1 hour of top quality
video on a single layer disc and about 2 hours on a double layer disc.
You can compress to double these playing times without much loss of
quality on many video sources.

First you have to capture the movie as a mpeg-2, and this requires
either a special internal or external capture device for the computer. I
use the ADS Instant DVD+DV device to capture either analog video or
digital video from camcorders. Your connect the audio and video outputs
of a satellite TV receiver or what other type of video device you have
to the input of the capture device. The capture device, if external,
connects to the computer with either a USB2 or firewire cable. You can
control capture of the video in many ways using the computer screen as a
monitor. The needed capture software comes with the capture device.
Assuming you have a DVD burner on the computer, you next need a program
to convert the mpeg-2 to standard DVD video format and to burn it to a
blank DVD. Both the Nero 6 ultra edition and Roxio 7 media program sets
will do this, and I have used both. Both allow you to select either PAL
or or the format we use in the US and in Japan. I would have no way of
knowing if a PAL DVD that I produced worked on a conventioal stand alone
DVD player, since mine plays only the standard US format. Also a few
DVDs recorded on a computer will not play on a few DVD players - mainly
older ones. For those who need to play TV in several formats, there are
converters for this and the price for them is much less than in the
past.

Commercial DVDs are another matter. Most are protected in several ways,
even if you have a disc in the right format for your DVD player and TV.
They often are encrypted to avoid both digital and analog duplication.
Also they have regional codes and will play only on DVD players sold in
a region with the same code. This allows movie companies great control
in how they release movies and DVDs in various countries. And of course
hackers have completely cracked all of this protection and supply free
programs to do it on a computer from servers out of the reach of
Hollywood lawyers.

My mailbox is always full to avoid spam. To contact me, erase
from my email address. Then add . I do not
check this box every day, so post if you need a quick response.