Reading NI TDMS files

[John W. Eaton]

On 18-Dec-2007, address@hidden wrote:

| Greetings to all,
| 
| National Instruments' Labview produces files in their semi-proprietary
| TDMS format.

How is it "semi" proprietary?

| They provide on their website a DLL and other files to
| read this format in C++.

So these DLLs are binary-only?  In that case, I think linking them
with Octave would be in violation of the terms of the GPL.

| Has anyone adapted these to work with Octave?
| I would like to read the files directly into Octave instead of going
| through a translation step.

If you want to avoid the license issues, then write a standalone
program that uses the DLLs to translate into a format that Octave can
read.  Then have Octave run that program as a separate process to do
the translation, then read the resulting data.

A better solution might be to avoid proprietary data formats, or
reverse-engineer the current format so that some free (as in speech)
tools can be developed to read and write the format.

jwe