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."

Comments

Re:DRM=WTF

[EvanED]

I don't see anywhere in either article that says they are limiting the number of times it's viewed. Can anyone clarify?

Re:DRM=WTF

[Propaganda13]

Yeah, it's Slashdot. They didn't RTFA. They mentioned limited number of burns, not views. This would be similar to some DRM that's been used by certain online music stores already.

Re:Never ever going to work

[dgatwood]

It won't really require a special DVD burner. Your DVD burner already burns zeroes over the CSS area if that area isn't pre-burned on the media. As best I can tell from a Google search, this is done for both DVD authoring media and DVD+R media. Thus, it would require nothing more than a firmware change with existing media to enable writing of CSS data.

Of course, they will tell you that it requires a special drive because they will want to keep the cost extremely high (so that it is only affordable by people running kiosks) to prevent people from buying the drives, installing them on their PCs, and doing byte-for-byte copies of movies including the CSS region....

My guess is that before this becomes available to your average consumers, they'll come up with some cryptographic handshake that only authorized software can perform, and will use this to prevent unauthorized software from writing to the region. That aspect of it might require updated burner hardware, but not because of any hardware changes needed to support the burning process itself.... That said, maybe they'll just relent, realize that CSS isn't stopping piracy in any useful way, and simply allow all the DVD burners' firmware to be updated to support burning CSS (and maybe pigs will fly, and...).

Already cracked -- it's just CSS

[whoever57]

This article has more information and clearly lays out that it is disks, burners, etc. "upgraded" to burn CSS