When CinemaNow announced its DVD writing capability for movie downloads, it looked
like great news for for those interested in legally downloading movies as it would mean giving them the capability to play their downloaded movies in a standard DVD player. Unfortunately unlike music download services that allow DRM-free CD writing, CinemaNow uses copy protection measures deveoped by FluxDVD to deliberately insert errors in the Digital Sum Value (DSV) checksum values to make it difficult to rip or copy. This copy protection measure has a side effect in that some DVD players may not be able to tolerate these checksum errors, which could result in a stuttering image or the disc refusing to play altogether.
After the
first report was mentioned about this issue on Ars
Technica, CinemaNow quickly responded to dispute the poor quality DVD writing support. CinemaNow claims that they have done extensive testing for standalone player compatibility with success in 94% of its players. So far, they have not received any complaints from its customers or the movie studios since the launch of the DVD writing capability.
On the
other hand, despite CinemaNow offering a fairly extensive library of movies, they currently only allow around 100 of its titles to be written to DVD for playback in standalone players.
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The report, which first appeared on the popular Boing Boing blog and picked up by a technology news site, said the digital rights management technology that prevented the DVD from being copied also made the movies unplayable on many commercial DVD players. The story quoted an anonymous optical disc R&D engineer who claimed to have examined CinemanNow's technology, called FluxDVD developed by ACE GmbH. In an emailed statement, the online movie service denied the claim, saying the burn-to-DVD service launched last month has been "well received by our customers and studios alike." |
It seems like the studios are giong really over the top when it comes to giving the ability to create DVDs from the movie downloads, especially since most store bought DVDs would not even use this level of copy protection. If they are doing this to prevent consumers from sharing movies online, they should think again, as chances are that every title that offers DVD writing capabilities is already freely available on P2P and obviously the P2P version would not have this issue, never mind having no DRM restriction in the file itself.
Until they change their attitude towards DVD writing, I would strongly recommend picking up a movie on DVD in-store instead of downloading it online. Not only would you get a DVD without this nasty copy protection measure, but it will also potentially last longer since the error correction is not being artificially weakened and you would get the official DVD, inlet, etc. Like music downloads written to CD, movie downloads written to DVD most likely cannot be resold.
Source: TechWeb
