Movie Studios OK Download-to-Burn DVDs 175
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."
Re:DRM=WTF (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Key that fits the lock! (Score:2, Informative)
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.
Wow! Yeah! Those hackers are so cunning they got a crack done 7 years ago [wikipedia.org]!
Re:Not a DVD-Video. (Score:3, Informative)
I don't see anything in either article that says they limit playback.
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.
You're half right I think. My reading is that what you download isn't DVD-Video, but can then be burned to DVD, at which point it is converted to DVD-Video and will playback on any DVD player. But the number of times you can do that burn from the original file (as opposed to copying the resulting DVD) is limited. Just like the way that iTunes will let you burn AAC-encoded files to CD some limited number of times.
Re:DRM=WTF (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Never ever going to work (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Start your clocks! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:But Ballbusters already eliminated late fees... (Score:1, Informative)
There was a proposal to do just this in 1992-3. A company was going to put a CD burner in listening stations and allow you to make your own mixes. A la carte pricing(as opposed to per MB like allofMP3) was going to average about $14/disc. The labels were a little lukewarm on it at the time and our store never got one and eventually the idea died on the vine. The labels started raising the prices on CD singles not long after by only selling them with a bunch of remixes of the same song and calling them maxis. Cassingles died their natural death and the labels returned to the model of selling albums of 10 crap songs with 2 or 3 good ones for 15.99 to 17.99. (Our wholesale price 11.70-14.30 IIRC)
As far as distribution is concerned, the labels generally don't give a rat's ass since that is borne by the retailer. The only time a store would receive a direct shipment from the label would be for niche-market new releases. Big releases came from our DC a week or two before they went on sale and held in the back room. Mom and Pops and small chains generally had distribution agreements with special-order wholesalers like AbbeyRoad and the like.
We even paid for the shipping of defective product back to the labels. Except for Sony, who decided in '92 that retailers were being too generous with their return policy. They even refused to accept genuinely defective discs with missing aluminum. Of course this came back to bite them in the ass. We started buying and selling used CDs later in the year and once the used Sony CDs started piling up at the DC, the DC set up a line to give them cutouts and sent them back to us with used-CD labels. You could pick up a week old Sony release for 5.99-6.99. No long box and a hole punched in the SKU, but still guaranteed defect-free by us. Yeah, I knew Sony was evil even before it was fashionable.
Incidentally, that's where those ultra-cheap CDs and cassettes you see in the supermarket and video store checkout line come from. The label holds onto their returns and overstock until the titles fall off even the back-catalogue charts and ship them out to have the cases opened, the bar code hole punched or pasted over with a generic SKU and rewrapped and sold by the thousand.
Now for burnable DVDs, I see the same issues with this as with the kiosks for music back in '92. The burn times are too long. A 4x CD burner still took 15 minutes per disc. A dual layer DVD even at 16x would be about the same. Try selling that the day after Thanksgiving.
Re:Never ever going to work (Score:4, Informative)
I write cd/dvd burning, data recovery, and forensic software for a living so I can try to clear this up a bit.
You are correct in a way but from what I understand what is really going on is the "CSS area" or Control Data Zone (CDZ) is pre-recorded at the factory on DVD-R (general) and DVD-RW media and with DVD-R (Authoring), DVD-R (version 1.0), DVD+R(W) media the drive firmware does not allow writing to the CDZ and overwrites it with dummy data as well as portions of the sector headers (which I think is used by CPPM). So like you said theoretically the manufacturers could release a firmware upgrade to allow writing to the CDZ on DVD-R (Authoring), DVD-R (version 1.0), DVD+R(W) media and possible do the same with DVD-R (general) and DVD-RW media although all of your old DVD-R (general) and DVD-RW media would be useless and you would have to purchase the new DVD-R(W) media that does not have that portion of the disc pre-recorded.
My guess is that they will release new DVD-R's (general) discs that do not have the CDZ pre-written and only allow the drive manufacturers to release firmware to write the CDZ on those discs. This way they can charge extra money for the discs and not just be able to use old DVD+R(W)'s. The drive manufacturers could make some extra money too by not releasing firmware that allows this on older drives and marketing "new" drives that have this ability.
Re:DRM=WTF (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Never ever going to work (Score:1, Informative)
Easy mistake to make on
Re:DRM=WTF (Score:3, Informative)
Netflix doesn't have any such stipulations...no late fees, no drm....you can do anything you want with your "backups"....
Well, the same's true with this, really. You burn to an image of a CSS DVD, then use DeCSS (or DVDShrink or some similar program that packages DeCSS) to strip the CSS so you have a DRM-free disc image. Burn as many times as you want. Rip to whatever format takes your fancy. Etc.