Did GIMP work?

http://www.adweek.com/digital/how-di...o-deconstruct/

They're Shockwave Director files so not a viable option unfortunately.

The extension .dcr has been used for several things, including Kodak RAW, but these are Shockwave files. You can only play them with the Shockwave player under Windows or OSX, so a Windows browser under Wine might work. Alternatively, the Pipelight plugin (with an additional Shockwave plugin) in an old Linux browser; newer browsers can't use Pipelight.

There is a program to convert dcr to mp4, etc, but Windows again! Whether it would run under Wine, I don't know.
http://www.jihosoft.com/flash/swf-converter.html

"if i were you I'd forget about browsers and flashplugins, but rather concentrate on trying to decompose the actual file.
so a search like for example "decompose or deconstruct shockwave files"."

I found the suggestion above from Ondoho fascinating — an idea that had never crossed my mind before.
One that is likely to outrun my competence, but it will certainly broaden my mind poking away at it!

Although my concerns with Shockwave are frankly unimportant (although interesting, at least to me) I find it sobering to think of the amounts of information that are being lost to these sorts of incompatibilities. The hurdles are not always impossible, just inconvenient enough. A friend of mine recently admitted he had years of records on zip-drives, but no longer had a player for them. I'm sure we have all at times encountered similar problems.

I've never found any discussion online reporting success with viewing Schockwave Director DCR files without using the software or the appropriate player, so good luck with that approach.

I still believe a more realistic approach is to get the authors (copyright owners?) assistance to republish these in a user-friendly format.

Indeed.
One of the things that many companies forget is that media deteriorate or just have no reader.
I have had to pursuade quite a few companies that they have to recreate all their legally required archives every year or when they are changing equipment.
Many a time I have had to search the country for a particular drive that was used to create archives. And curiously, the bigger the company, the bigger the problem.