Have managed to grab a DVD recorded in our Philips unit at work. Used DVD Decryptor to rip down the video/audio streams seperately. The AC-3 plug-in for Nero lets you burn the ripped audio stream to a CD. So I can burn to an image file, mount the image file as a virtual CD and rip back to WAV for editing before finally burning out to CD. This sounds more complex than it actually is.

You can also take the ripped audio/video streams straight into Nero Express and either edit from there and burn out to DVD or export as an AVI and use something like Premiere (with the Panasonic MPEG plug-in) to do more complex edits.

I'll definately be picking up a DVD recorder in the New Year - not having to use a PC for audio/video capture is a godsend, but still having the flexibility of using it as an editing tool is there. I'm very impressed at the simplicty - and all using free software or software that I already had to hand (Nero came with my DVD burner, DVD Decryptor is free)