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Movie Studios OK Download-to-Burn DVDs
fistfullast33l writes "The Associated Press is reporting that today movie studios have approved Sonic Solutions' technology Qflix, which allows people to download movies and burn them to DVDs that include CSS, the method of encryption that protects all pre-recorded DVDs sold today. According to a press release issued by Sonic Solutions, they will be demoing the technology by appointment at the Consumer Electronics Show on January 8th. Apparently the DVDs will also be subject to DRM restrictions placed by download services such as limiting the times a movie can be played back and how many times the movie can be burned. Is this the death of NetFlix as we know it? Interestingly enough, the AP article mentions burning kiosks in the future and the Sonic release mentions Walgreen's as a partner, so maybe DVD burning is coming to a drug store near you. Sonic Solutions is the owner of Roxio, which produces a well-known CD and DVD burning software suite."
A limit to the number of viewings? What the hell? Limiting the number of burns is reasonable (as far as DRM goes) if the number's around 3 or 5, but limiting the number of viewings is outright inane. If you pay for a movie, you should be able to view it as many times as you want.
Care about privacy? Read this!
A few days?
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
I want downloadable movies, but not like this. It's still not an excuse for piracy (in case anyone gets funny ideas) but there are so many better solutions to this.
doomed to failure. just like voluntarily paying more for "music" CD-Rs.
Instead of a 5,000 square foot store Blockbuster and Netflix can work out deals with Walgreens, Wal*Mart, and other retail storefronts to place a DVD-burning kiosk in their stores. All they need is power and a high speed net connection and they'll be good to go. Blockbuster could also eliminate in-store inventory altogether....bring the empty DVD case to the checkout and the clerk burns you a DVD to take home in a paper sleeve. When you're through watching the movie you toss the DVD. No shortages of the top hits, and the customer never needs to come back to return the DVD and pay a late fee.
"We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers." Carl Sagan
Because we all know how well that works.
/surfing from Myth which plays DVDs, thanks Jon
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Oh look, it's DIVX all over again.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
It would've had the possibility of being the death of netflix. That was right up until they said it would include DRM. Divx didn't work, why do they think this is any different? They just never learn *shame*.
It's still going to take 15 minutes to burn and read test the disc ... unless they want to risk sending someone home with a coaster. Throw in some time to LightScribe or print a label, too.
... they'll probably use the lowest bidder and end up with crap media. Bonus - each disc will self-destruct in a fairly short time. People will consider them disposable, so no one will complain.
Also, I doubt they'll spring for TY 8x +R media bitset to DVD-ROM
Here's my bet: someone will have Qflix hacked before the first content provider moves it past the beta stages. This certainly isn't going to prevent movie copying/sharing/pirating, although it probably will limit the percentage of the population savvy enough to pirate them.
Crack - Free with every butt and set of boobs
Death of Netflix? Unfortunately for some of us, (me included), The USPS has greater throughput than the only reasonably priced internet connection. So... Netflix will live on. At least for a while.
Netflix will always be around. I can't imagine downloading a movie. recently I bought a movie from itunes store. I played it back in comparison with the actual dvd I had rented from netflix. The itunes movie quality is HORRIBLE. Also I don't think they're going to be placing all older movies on this download service. This download service will be come a complete failure to anyone who truely loves movies and actual film quality.
There is no way this will beat Netflix. People like my mother use Netflix simply because she doesn't like buying movies. It costs her a few dollars to see a movie through Netflix, where I doubt that these 'download' movies will be less than $12.99USD.
Riddle me this: Do you really think there are more people out there willing/able to download and burn a full-length DVD (including those who know what DRM is) than willing to hop on a website and order movies to their homes? Hell, for as fast as Netflix is in getting movies out, you could likely order one and have it delivered before your download of the same movie would be completed.
Somebody wake me when I can go online or on my TV and order any movie I want on-demand.
Oh, and the DRM scheme of limiting the number of times you can watch the movie on your computer is about the most fucking stupid thing I've heard today. This is another industry trying to ensure that you will NEVER own anything.
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That was the first thing that popped into my mind. Divx failed once, I have a feeling its going to fail again.
I do like the idea of buying a movie online, downloading and burning it. What I don't want is to pay $20 and only get to view the movie a few times, or for a limited time. This is defiantly a "wait and see" technology. If there playback is unlimited, and the price is not insane, I'd be willing to buy movies this way.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Laziness is the father.
The article tends to be hazy on where the actual encryption takes place. At one point, it sounds as if it would be a hardware-independent solution (I mean, encrypted or not, it's still just a filesystem, right?) but then they go on to make it sound like it requires specific firmware abilities.
Either way, if the CSS is as easy to break as the that of existing DVDs... Sign me up.
Your mind is clear / The things that you fear / Will fade with how much you / Believe what you hear
It would be less inconvenient to the consumer if they forced us to do twenty situps before downloading.
"All DVD players come equipped with a key that fits the lock and allows for playback."
This is the equivalent of leaving your front door key underneath the mat. It won't be long at all until the crack is widely available.
Where this will get implemented is in blockbuster stores. The good news here is the kiosk will probably run windows, so I'm thinking the boxes should be owned pretty quickly too.
I think the point is there are a few bad people that really would look under the mat and go into the house. The rest of us wouldn't so it can be very useful/profitable to media owners.
Hopefully this is the opposite direction of most of the downloaded movie services like amazon who's EULA will make your hair curl. http://www.defectivebydesign.org/en/blog/670
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
If you're late, they just sell you the DVD and bill your credit-card. While this DVD-kiosk idea would certainly help them cut back on retail space, staff, stocking costs, etc. it would also completely eliminate their "sales" division.
Besides, this kiosk idea is so far removed from the traditional experience of "roaming the racks" that it would leave absolutely nothing to distinguish between downloading a movie and going to the store to rent it, except that you have to leave your comfy couch to do it and, most likely, pay a bit more. Really, only the technophobes are going to be going to rental stores in the near future, so why alienate them? Of course, the shift away from brick and mortar rental stores is definitely coming. Blockbuster et al. are most likely going to find some way to carve themselves a slice of the pie, but one can't help but wonder how long there will be actual Blockbuster corner video stores in operation.
I know people who have been downloading full DVD's for several years, now. They'll be glad to know that the RIAA has OK'ed it.
Actually Krogers and Marsh (grocery chains) already have do-it-all rental kiosks. The only limiting thing is the selection, but with the growth of broadband around here. Even that problem could disappear.
"When you're through watching the movie you toss the DVD. No shortages of the top hits, and the customer never needs to come back to return the DVD and pay a late fee."
What's the difference between "tossing it" and buying it, and how do you enforce that difference?
---
HDHomeRun-Networked Digital HDTV Tuner
"apparently DVDs will also be subject to DRM restrictions placed by download services such as
limiting the times a movie can be played back
and how many times the movie can be burned."
The first limitation is not possible, unless DIVX really won against DVD.
The second limitation is also not part of the DVD-Video standard, and it means that you probably need some windows program that downloads the video in Arbitrariy-proprietary-DRM-format-173, then converts they to a a non-standard DVD you can only play on windows or off-standard DVD players.
How about video on demand?
With the increasing deployment of digital set top boxes, and new services such as IPTV running on VDSL lines that can receive 52Mbit/s, and service prices continuing to drop, video on demand is a more viable solution than anything involving someone having to actually burn a DVD!
By the time these kiosks are setup so you can get a DVD burned at the Grocery store, you probably won't bother because you could just watch it at home for less than $5!
It's also a lot easier to let your content provider deal with the legal implications than even thinking about DRM!
I do like the idea of buying a movie online, downloading and burning it. What I don't want is to pay $20 and only get to view the movie a few times, or for a limited time.
What if it were $2 and the # of viewings or time was limited?
So wait... you wait hours and hours downloading a dvd sized video and then you have to burn it to a disc? Sounds awesome, maybe after we burn it to disc we can copy it to a stack of floppies. Why not put a NIC and a harddrive in an entertainment center?
Which basically means there's nothing to see. Move along.
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
I understand why. If they could encode the films with whoever payed for and downloaded them. Then you know who's sharing. Kinda like coding pre-released films they send to the academy so they know who leaked them.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
Death of Netflix eh? I don't think so. I really, really don't get why companies are dying to offer movie downloads. The product is exactly what you'd get at your local megamart, which you can walk out of with a DVD for 10 bucks. Music is a different story, the online retailers are offering a per-song model, something not available otherwise, and the prices are right. Are the online movie folks really going to be able to beat $10, or even match it considering the cost of blank DVD media? Where's the value? Even over broadband, downloading that much data takes a while.
"The problem with internet quotations is that many are not genuine" -Abraham Lincoln
This technology is a few years too early to have a serious impact on Netflix.
First off, a 9 GB download still takes quite a while. Assume a 6 megabit connection (a spherical cow with no mass?) which is capable of a sustained download rate of 500 K/s (which is unlikely, given my experience with my local provider). You're looking at 9,000 / 0.5 = 18,000 s = 300 minutes = 5 hours. Who in their right mind is going to feel good about waiting 5 hours for a movie download?
Now, this is before we even get started on the addition DRM crap they want to subject their customers to.
In order for this to be successful, they are going to need to (a) wait until 50 megabit connections are common and (b) allow consumers to download _exactly_ the same bits that they would get if they bought the DVD in a store.
Being able to download and burn DVD's at Walgreen's would be great for all the Moms and Pops who aren't computer-savvy and still have a 5-year-old E-machine as their PC. Without the DVD packaging, shipping, and cost of shelf space, they could be offered a lot cheaper too... as long as the price is right and inane DRM restrictions don't ruin it.
Simplicity is always the key to mass market.
- For every action, there is an equal and opposite criticism.
Listen up folks, the limited viewings are not for DVD, read carefully because two seperate concepts got mangled in the summary.
What is interesting about this is that Hollywood is close to giving up on CSS. They are about to permit hardware makers to market a drive capable of writing the CSS blocks and writable media to leave a factory without the CSS blocks preburned to zeros. While I suspect they have a DRM trick up their sleeve we know it won't work in this case, as there really isn't a way to retrofit around the flaws in CSS and remian compatible with the installed base of DVD players.
Ding dong the witch is dead, but of course it has already been dead and the body is pretty smelly, enough that Hollywood couldn't ignore it anymore. I think this is a good idea actually. Not for everything and everybody, but I can imagine cases where I might actually use it.
Scenario 1: Downloads. I could see paying to download and burn vs paying to have physical media shipped. If there was a big enough price gap to make the slightly faster delivery enough better to offset the loss of the professional screen printed artwork and such. Or if it were used for obscure titles that wouldn't rate a production run and the choice is between a DVD-R and nothing.
Or try Scenario 2: Go to a website, pick the titles you want to purchase and pick up the media (which could even be dye sub printed and cased) at your friendly neighborhood retailer (the article mentions a deal in the works with Wallgreens) later the same day. Note that this scenario would even allow Hollywood to tightly control distribution of totally blank burnable media.
Democrat delenda est
They're giving a demo of DVD shrink, BitTorrent, and Nero?
Oh, wait. WITH css. Oh, well.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
This article has more information and clearly lays out that it is disks, burners, etc. "upgraded" to burn CSS
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Actually, for many years I did own a home audio CD recorder which did require "music" CD-R's. They cost negligibly more than "data" CD-R's.
What absolutely totally pissed me off beyond belief was the day I brought a CD home and it wouldn't copy, because it had some damned kind of copy protection built in that triggered the SCCS lockout in my recorder.
I kept MY end of the bargain, God damn it. I paid for every copy I made. And I was totally entitled to make those copies under the Audio Home Recording Act. And both the publishers and artists were paid for every copy.
But, noooooo, that's not good enough for the music industry. They set up a one-sided bargain and then won't even keep their side of it.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Bonfires of destruction targeted at the DRM?
I PRTFA.
Apparently the DVDs will also be subject to DRM restrictions placed by download services such as limiting the times a movie can be played back
We're sorry. Viewing restrictions on this DVD are such that you may only watch Star Whores Episode II - Attack of the Bones between 2pm and 5pm, when your wife is at work.
Qflix and Netflix use exactly the same DRM system.
Also, you are ignoring the difference between renting and buying.
RTFA Submitter.
For the rental market this is OK(1), but for the ownership crowd it's not. There's still that life of pressed disks vs burned issue.
*I say OK with a cavet. It will fill our landfills with lots of oil-derived plastic disks. I already see plenty of the buggers in the gutters and lawns of the city I live in.
Some burners can be updated, Sonic said, and companies such as Plextor, a Qflix partner, are expected to market Qflix-enabled DVD burners that connect with a USB cable.
Yeah.... buffering... that wor... buffering...ks for.... buffering.... me
qz
I'm guessing that burned DVD's won't last as long as pressed DVD's, as is true with CD's.
Changes between 0.8.6 and 0.8.7:
Decoders:
* Qflix support
Goodbye environment!
There's one in the grocery store in Coopersville, MI.
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I'd say in less than one week, Apple will announce that movies purchased in the iTMS will be burnable to DVD, and that any required CSS changes to drives will be a free firmware update (available via Software Update immediately after the keynote) for all Macs w/ internal DVD burners.
;-)
So, now that iTMS announcement is decoded, on the the iPod phone(s)...
Netflix will always be around. I can't imagine downloading a movie. recently I bought a movie from itunes store. I played it back in comparison with the actual dvd I had rented from netflix. The itunes movie quality is HORRIBLE.
You *really* need to find a good torrent site. Lots of complete DVD-ISOs are available, with full resolution and quality of a regular DVD. Download the ISO, watch the movie, and if it's the rare movie which is actually entertaining or intelligent, buy it to support the studios, crew and performers. Otherwise, rm. (Yes, I use P2P, but only for auditioning. I'm sick of renting or buying (either way shelling out money on) crap movies and/or music.) 40 Year Old Virgin, LOTR, Private Parts and Fight Club all ended up as part of my permanent collection thanks to this - I was *happy* to shell out the coin to have real DVDs.
Also I don't think they're going to be placing all older movies on this download service.
Playing devil's advocate in selection of available movies; it wouldn't surprise me if the selection process was this asinine: "Old movies? Of course not! No one who has ever heard of the Internet would be interested in watching Citizen Kane or The Lost Weekend! That would waste bandwidth for Snakes on a Plane!"
This download service will be come a complete failure to anyone who truely loves movies and actual film quality.
ACTUAL film quality on a DVD? Hell, even from any consumer monitor currently available? Not gonna happen. DVDs often have visible compression artifacts, and they all have limited resolution (even HD-DVD or whatever it's called). Film's resolution is limited more by the grain of the film, and it's pretty well near at least two orders of magnitude finer than any consumer monitor can handle. Indeed, the film's quality is often limited by the quality of lens on the camera and projector. Want film quality? Get a 35mm and a 70mm film projector.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
This is great, just use DVD Shrink and get a non-drm DVD! Awesome! I hope it works out.
I've seen them here in San Diego (Vons). It made me laugh. They look corny and the whole idea of having a movie dispensed like a soda can kind of turns me off. If the speed is alright (I'm sure its kind of tedious now) it might fly, but they will definately have to do better product/marketing wise. I feel cheap just looking at the thing.
Quack, quack.
Seem to be two systems idea here. One is that you can download and burn a DVD as you currently do with iTunes (with a limit on the number of burns), the other using a booth to allow you to burn your own DVD.
Now I've no problem with the limited burns, as once you've burnt it once, you can copy/rip the DVD using the existing de-CSS stuff.
What IS interesting is the involvement of HD-DVD and Blu-Ray people. Retailers aren't too keen on HD stuff yet and REALLY don't want to stock identical content on two different and confusing formats. If the booth system is used for the HD formats, then I can see this being a massive gain. If, for example, my local shop stocks the top 50 titles on BlueRay, but has a booth allowing me to get a copy of all HD-DVDs available from the magical booth - then I know which format player I'm more likely to invest in.
Cheaper retailing costs, complete availability, never running out etc - FFS there's no reason the system couldn't be expanded to shove TV onto the disks if that's what you fancy.
What's this based on? The only uses of nationalism I've heard is as a synonym for patriotism and/or as a misguided belief in a country's indigenous populace having innate character traits (widely used in History in academia in this sense). Where does Government come into it?
Stupid people think it's cool. Smart people thinks it's a joke; also cool.
is this the death of NetFlix as we know it?
Not necessarily... Whenever I burn a DVD, it takes forever, sometimes doesn't work quite right and just isn't quite the same as a nice and polished commercial DVD. Sure, if I really knew what I was doing and had awesome equipment maybe things would be different. For the average Joe downloading a movie and burning it to a DVD to watch, in most cases, once is too much of a pain in the ass. Most people would rather just pick the movies they want in a list and have the real deal sent to them.
Now video on demand however, is a spin of the downloadable content and could put NetFlix down. If these movie download websites integrate with other equipment (think TiVo or some type of set top box) that can be rented or purchased, then we might have a winner. Sitting in front of the TV and clicking "Play" with a remote and having the content stream in is pretty cool. I loved having this on my old cable network and if a third party offered something similar, it would be healthy competition, especially if the service offered popular TV show archives as well.
In other words, all the beautiful technologies we have grown to love! If you think all they are going to do is put CSS on disks you are greatly mistaken. They do seem to care about quality of disks but not your ability to archive or back them up. On a side note, this might not be that bad for kiosks, but I would rather buy a *real* DVD than wait 20 min for this thing to come out. Like I don't have better things to do.
"You're everywhere. You're omnivorous."
My wife wanted an Ipod because it looks good. .ogg before. .ogg files did convert to native apple, without audible loss, but she's a purist and itunes works for what it's meant for.
Got her one.
Put all our mp3s on it and reripped all the CDs that we'd converted to
BTW, the
Videos, too--anything we want--if it's not already in the right format, just use ffmpegx and it fits.
Not seeing the restriction, here.
Oh, and it does look good. She says it sounds good, too; I wouldn't know--she's the musician.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
DVDs have some DRM, but it's been cracked so thoroughly that it doesn't really count. I can play a rented DVD on my laptop in bed (under any OS), on my DVD player connected to a projector, or I can rip it and transcode it for playing on a portable device (I have a few, and none of them run Windows). Give me a download service which lets me do the same thing, and I'll use it. If you put DRM on it, however, then this limits where I can watch the film to 'authorised' technologies, which typically means 'systems I don't own.'
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
All of this reduces THEIR cost of distribution, liners, extras, shipping, production, etc.
I'd bet none of it reduces YOUR cost of actually getting the DVD and taking it home.
This doesn't benefit the consumer. It benefits the studios and distribution companies. That is it. Move along.
-M
when you see the word 'Linux', drink!
What if it were $2 and the # of viewings or time was limited?
Maybe. The first question is going to be whether or not I need to buy a new DVD player or not. On of the reasons DIVX bothered me was that I had to buy a new player for it. I have a good DVD player, I'm not buying a new one so that I can subscribe to some silly service, Blockbuster is within walking distance. The second part of it is going to be ease of use. Downloading and burning a DVD is enough trouble, if I'm having to jump though a bunch of other hoops as well, it's not gonna happen. Lastly is going to be timeliness. At the moment, I have a 3Mb download (DSL) so a 4.5GB download is going to take around (4.5GB * 1024MB/GB * 8Mb/MB * 1s/3Mb * 1min/60s * 1hr/60min = ~3.4hr) 3 and a half hours. And that doesn't figure in overhead and burn time, so it's probably going to be closer to 4.5 to 5 hours. If I plan ahead, this will be fine, if I am bored and looking for a movie to entertain me, it's not feasible. Also, how much bandwidth am I going to get on the servers? Is the service actually going to provide me with a 3Mb download stream, or are they going to limit me to 1Mb or worse?
I'm willing to bet that the place this will work is going to be at kiosks or even Blockbuster et al. They can keep the movies on local storage and then burn on demand. Assuming that I don't have to replace my DVD player, and that the discs expire appropriately, this could be a boon for the DVD rental business. They would no longer need to worry about being out of stock on a particular movie, just the burnable discs themselves. I could view the movie then toss the disc (hopefully biodegradable and organic based). Of course, Blockbuster specifically would never go for it, how would they charge late fees then?
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Laziness is the father.
I tried burning DVDs - I could never get the damn things to play in my DVD players around the house. After lots of forum searching, I found that burning a DVD is really a black art.
So now I don't bother anymore.
I just bought a Dlink MediaLounge for Christmas. I now fetch the media off of my 400GB hard drive and display it directly on my TV, skipping the step of making a DVD.
I think downloading DVDs is great - but I don't need to burn them to a DVD to play them, and I'm not interested in paying for any media that expires after any period of time.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
I've thought for years that a simple firmware mod could solve the modchip problem on a per-burner basis..... I'm truly surprised no one has tried to live up to the challenge.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com