Ok - obviously these aren't tape formats.
With mini DVD-RW, these camcorders recorded straight to small 8cm, 1.4Gb DVD discs which could then be played back in (most) standard DVD/Blu-ray players, or copied very quickly onto any computer with a compatible drive. Not quite as convenient as recording onto solid-state media like SD cards, and the recording time wasn't amazing (around 30 minutes in SP mode), but still much quicker than copying tapes over Firewire which took the same length of time as your recording.
DVD (in any of the -r/+r/+rw variants) was never a camcorder format, although plenty of people used their DVD recorders to archive their camcorder footage because it made it so much easier to play it back on set-top devices and computers.
However, this previous ease of media transfer/playback is now starting to cause issues. Not everyone still has a physical media player hooked up to the TV and these days an increasing amount of new computers (especially laptops) aren't coming with a DVD drive. Add to that the potential for "disc rot" where the dye used in the disc starts to break down and it's really time to get your footage transferred to another format.
If you do have a DVD/Blu-ray drive in your computer then you can back up your footage yourself by simply navigating to the disc and copying everything on it to a folder on your hard drive or a USB stick. You don't actually need all the files but you can sort that later. If you get read errors, try cleaning the disk with a soft cloth and something like glass cleaner. If the disc is seriously unreadable, especially if the surface is badly scratched there are solutions to scrub the disc surface to try and restore it.
Once you get the files safely backed up you can then convert the footage to something that's a bit more compatible with modern devices, like MP4. Again, there are plenty of cheap and even free software packages that will do this for you.
If, however, all of this sounds like "BLAHBLAHBLAH whatever geekboy" then that's fine - drop off your discs and I'll do the conversion for you.
