Foo - Mini DVD's=Compatible with....nothing?

Hey

You know those little mini DVD's for the DVD camcorders? Well the concept is great. But using them in the sense of playback is IMPOSSIBLE. I swear those little dvd's are not compatible with anything other than the actual camcorder that I used.

I have some footage of my drum teachers concert, and I cant watch it because it doesn't work on my DVD player or any of my comps (of course they are dvd compatible)


So what is the point of using these little dvds, when, well, THEY DONT WORK!?

Is there something taht I am missing that I should know to make my live a little easier?

Thanks

Uh, yeah you got the idea. The DVDs are for easy and quick storage. NOT for compatibility with a home DVD-player. The format of the files are not the same as MPEG2 used on home DVD-players. Many of them are more efficient modern MPEG4 compression. Holds about 5-10x as much video per gig as the older MPEG2 standard. The only advantage to the DVD camcorders is they have higher-capacity than micro/miniDV tape. They can be transfered to your computer much faster than downloading through firewire/USB2. Just pop the DVD out of the camcorder, drop into your PC's DVD drive, fire up the video-editing software and you're into production within seconds.

There are additional pieces of data that needs to be formatted onto the DVD before it will play in the home-player decks. Stuff like menus, chapters, language options, region-coding, etc. All of which needs to be done in post-production as part of the mastering process after the shoot is over. There's a reason video-productionn costs $1000 per finished minute.

I want one of these new JVC Everio hard drive camcorders:

http://www.gadgetreview.com/uploaded_images/jvc-hd-camera-757013.jpg

30 hours of recording time with super-quick downloading to a computer for editing/burning.

ugh.

great, just wonderful...I dont have a dvd drive...

Unless....I could get the software from mu friend and put it on my dad's laptop... (not my dvd recorder btw)