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Legal DVD Burnable Downloads Launched
rogabean writes to tell us that Hollywood studios have taken a large step into the future by launching their new program with CinemaNow which allows users to legally download and burn DVDs. While the current of offerings seems to be just the dregs, studio execs hope to expand the list quickly and offer a new way to find niche or older films that are difficult to locate.
Why pay $9 for movies that are in the $5 bin at Wal-Mart already? Scent of a F-ing Woman????? Al Pachino owes me $7 for seeing that in the theater.
I'd rather see the service go after recent 1st run movies at the same time the $1-$2 theaters get them. I'd pay $9 to download and burn a featureless DVD of a recent release(think X-Men 3) and still consider buying the commercial DVD is I liked the film enough. It would give the studios a revenue stream on a flick while they were working on the DVD title.
STFU & GBTW
What with these things costing $9-$15 for old titles, they'll be almost as dear as buying the real thing from stores, or online. But, when you've had enough, you certainly won't be able to raise any beer money selling them on, and ebay will probably think you're selling a dodgy copy!
That's what I was thinking. The movies you find in Wal-mart in the 2 for $10 bin are now going to be available for download for $9 (time, computer, internet connection, DVD burner and blank media not included).
Just be sure you don't burn a coaster on that first try...
Perhaps by selling special media with a key pre-burned in that place where the CSS keys usually are (and can't be burned on normal blank media) and special burning software that will only decrypt and burn an encrypted image to DVDs that have been assigned to that DVD image online?
Rich
Lets be fair- Scent of a Woman was good, Al Pacino had a great performance in it. Puke on the other two, if you don't mind.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
After, a quick look of this site, they use DRM from Windows... So goodbye Linux and Apple. As per the article an agreement with Apple for the distribution... (M$ DRM on Apple...) And the worst part, they`re talking about something that prevent the burner to burn more than one copy, sounds like a rootkit to me. Basically, the movie branch of Sony will repeat the same mistake as the music branch.
Its possible that it just casually prevents the burner from burning more than one copy by marking the original file as "burned". But you never can know. Of course this won't stop the determined, and noone knows when the studios will figure that that is noway to stop the determined.
It's been tried already. Well, sort of. There was a very obscure format of recordable dvd called "HV-DVD" which worked similarly. They came with a unique serial number on each disc that could be used as part of the decryption key. I think only one media vendor ever even announced that they were going to sell HV-DVD blanks, and I suspect they never made it to market.
In my opinion the problem with that approach is that you can use a DVD emulator. So, even though a normal recordable DVD can't record a serial number, the emulator can fake it. And in fact most of the pre-standard high-def dvds that use microsoft's WM9 (mostly a bunch of IMAX discs, although europe had some mainstream releases) can be copied and and their DRM completely circumvented with one of many such software emulators.
FWIW, with the advent of HD-DVD there are a bazillion typos that say "HV-DVD" when they meant "HD-DVD" so digging for a link to a page talking about actual HV-DVD media is like finding a needle in a haystack. I may be misremembering the name, it might have been H-DVD or HI-DVD. I am pretty sure it meant "high-video" whatever the exact acronym was.
PS, the only reason I ever heard of this format was I ran across an HV-DVD logo on a website with homebrew DVD-case covers for people burning actual HDTV transport streams to DVD. Someone had misused the logo for these covers and since it looked so professional I figured it must have come from somewhere. Back then BLU-RAY and HD-DVD were barely heard of so googling for it worked a lot better.
From the CinemaNow Webpage: "To watch the movie or burn it to DVD, you will need CinemaNow's easy-to-use DVD Burner software"
So it is not just an easy distributable ISO that you download. I can see how they can prevent making more than one copy from the image file since you must use their own burning software but I fail to see what would stop a person from making a copy of the newly burned DVD. I also would be curious as to how they unforce the one copy limit, the only way that makes sense to me is to force the user to be online and do some type of validating with their servers, otherwise just making a copy of the file before burning it would be able to get around the one copy limit since they would have to edit the file in some way to recognize it as "used".
Either way, if the resulting disc is playable in a standalone DVD player then there is no way to prevent the movie from being lifted off the disc. This model might look good to a suit who doesn't know any better because they think, "This is great, even if the image file is shared over the internet it can only be used once!", and while that is true they will probably overlook the fact that people can still copy and create images of the burned disc just as easily as before.
Hey, there is only one Return and it's not of the King, it's of the Jedi.