OT: 1000 year DVD storage

Why on earth would anyone who cares about data preservation use a closed data format?! I would convert everything to plain text, one way or another. If necessary, I would include a text file describing everything (unobvious or not; I would prefer to describe unnecessarily than omit something I thought obvious only for it to be unobvious to the future readers). I don't know which natural languages will still be extant a thousand years on, but, given the number of people today who can understand texts from a millennium (or more!) ago, I would expect such expertise to be available, though probably not common. This could perhaps be improved by including a deliberate Rosetta stone - translate the text into every sufficiently major language live at the time (which today might mean English, Arabic, Mandarin, Russian, and Hindi, to name the ones that come to my mind immediately). It might also help to treat the future readers as first-contact aliens (because, mentally, they very well might amount to that) and include a prelude along those lines; people have given a good deal of thought to that question and their recommendations might be worth reading. As for character-set encoding, I see no alternative but to assume that the future readers are at least as competent at breaking simple substitution ciphers as we are, which pretty much amounts to ignoring the issue. If you're including a first-contact style prelude, it may be able to help. Were the first DVDs burned? I've always assumed they were pressed, more or less like CDs. Am I wrong? Yeah. Compare today to 1913.... /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B