Dell has shipped its first Desktops that contain Qflix DVD drives. Sonic Solutions and Pioneer Corporation develop and license Qflix, which is a technology that allows for the burning of CSS (and DRM) protected DVD-Video to blank DVD-R media, which can be played on a standard DVD player. Sonic hopes to establish Qflix as a standard for recordable CSS and charge royalties for its use.
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This should be interesting, as most movies are on DVD-9 media to begin with. I'm assuming that double-layer DVD-R burning is dead, so you could only burn this CSS disc on a single layer DVD-R, which would decrease the film's quality and/or cut out the extras.
This is a terrible idea in many ways. First of all, any number of free tools can remove the good ol' garden variety CSS protection scheme.
What may not be apparent to the uninformed customer is that there are a slew of other protections present on both single and double-layer pressed DVDs that this hardware probably can't touch, such as SONYARccOS, as well as numerous others. And my guess is that Dell will not go out of their way to make this little caveat apparent to the buyers of machines that come with these drives.
Originally posted by KillerBug: This is not about serving customers, it is an out of date idea from an out of date industry. When it fails, I am sure they will blame piracy.
Two groups of customers can benefit from this.
First, Warner (and perhaps other movie companies) may provide downloadable content, which is not legally available now. (Believe it or not, there are people who don't want to pirate content.) This is similar to iTunes with DRM. When iTunes started, the music companies required DRM, and if DRM didn't exist, iTunes would not exist.
If people can download a DRM protected movie and burn a DVD they are more likley to buy it, than if they could only watch it on a computer. Of course, it would be nice if a legal DRM-free copy was avaliable, (I'm very happy that's happened with music!) but that's not the issue here. And, that's not up to Sonic or Dell. Sonic, Dell, and the movie companies are teaming-up to provide a new choice.
Second, there are small private video production companies who want to copy-protect their DVDs. The question, "How do I copy-protect my DVDs?" comes-up frequently on video editing forums. Of course it's weak protection, but the big movie companies seem to think it's worthwhile to pay CSS & Macrovision royalties. And, if you are only selling 10, 20, or 100 copies, it's less likely that someone is going to crack the copy protection. You need one person who is willing and able to remove the CSS, and one or more people who want the pirated copy. The smaller your customer base, the less likely it is for these people to get together.
