Cinema....Naw

I've previously written about my generally positive experiences with CinemaNow and Movielink's downloadable movie rental services….in fact, I've got two CinemaNow-served movies ('The Village' and 'Why We Fight') sitting on my laptop's hard drive as I type this. Both companies, back in early April, added the ability to purchase movies which you could burn onto to a DVD (in digital rights managed, i.e. DRM'd, Windows Media Video format) and play on multiple PCs. And the download-and-rent-or-buy-with-DRM market has gotten even more crowded in recent weeks, with Amazon and Apple joining the fray.

However, the 'buy' option offered by most suppliers is fundamentally limited to computer-based playback, along with DRM-cogniscent streaming from a Windows Media Center Edition-equipped PC to a Media Center Extender such as an Xbox 360. Why? None of the services, with one exception that I'll get to beginning in the next paragraph, let you burn a disc that you can play back in a conventional DVD player. And no currently-available DVD player, even if it supports the MPEG-4 AVC and WMV codecs employed by iTunes and the various Windows Media-based services, comprehends the content's DRM wrapper.

That service exception is CinemaNow's 'Burn to DVD'. I test-drove 'Burn to DVD' (whose downloaded files you can also direct-play from a PC through Windows Media Player) immediately after it launched in mid-July, by downloading 'Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle'. The $8.99-and-up movie options offered by 'Burn to DVD' are limited when compared to 'Buy' and 'Rent', to put it nicely; they're predominantly B-grade and archaic, although recent trends are encouraging. 'Full Throttle' was one of the only 'Burn to DVD' options offered that I hadn't seen and was remotely interested in seeing. It had the added advantage of being action- and detail-filled and thereby acted as a good test of the service's video compression quality. Befitting my categorization, Sony chose 'Full Throttle' as the first Blu-ray title the company mastered.

'Burn to DVD' sounds great in theory, but the devil's in the details. The file payload was 3.8 GBytes in size, and it took 6 hours to download over my 1.2 Mbps (sustained) DSL link. Transcoding it to MPEG-2 (video) and Dolby Digital (audio) for subsequent burn to DVD took another six hours on my Dell Inspiron 700m laptop (1.6 GHz Pentium M processor, 1.5 GBytes of RAM), and created an incremental HDD-gobbling ~4.5 GByte temporary file image. Not exactly 'instant gratification', is it? Compare this to the fact that within a 10 minute drive of my house, I've got dozens of DVD retail outlets at my disposal, with a vastly broader selection of movies available for purchase. For someone who lives 'in the boonies' far from Wal-Mart, or for an online service offering obscure titles not typically stocked by a brick-and-mortar merchant (the so-called 'Long Tail' effect), 'Burn to DVD' might make sense. But I struggle to envision a fit in my particular situation.

The bad news continues when you pop the CinemaNow-sourced disc in your DVD player. The image quality is very soft, compared to a conventional DVD of the same title, and in spite of the fact that the 'Burn to DVD' disc's MPEG-2 bitrate is fairly high (albeit likely restricted so that the entire disc image fits within a single DVD layer). And the presentation only came in a 4:3 aspect ratio 'pan-and-scan' video format, with only two-channel audio. If it were me selecting the content to be offered with this title, I would have tossed out the disc's 'extras' and focused the available storage space on more immersive audio and video for the main title. Playing the downloaded file in Windows Media Player, I'm unable to determine which audio and video codecs CinemaNow employed; 'properties' is nonspecific. This Digg post posits that CinemaNow chose DRM'd Divx which, if true, would explain the sub-optimal presentation; modern DivX's codec suite is MPEG-4 Advanced Simple Profile for video and MP3 for audio.

The final bit of bad news involves the nonstandard fluxDVD format that CinemaNow and partner ACE GmbH employed in order to combat copyright-circumventing disc copying. The 'Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle' disc I burned played fine in all of my Windows PCs and Macs, and in my JVC DVD player. Others haven't been so lucky. Indicative of the checksum errors that fluxDVD intentionally applies to the disc (similar to copy-protection approaches used by many game title developers), Windows Explorer and OS X's Finder reported obviously incorrect file and disc size information. And none of the Windows- and OS X-based CSS-circumventing utilities I threw at the disc was able to 'rip' the DVD (although I didn't try this one)….good news for content suppliers, not so good news for consumers who believe that making backups of their legally purchased content is covered under Fair Use doctrines. Look for more, and more CSS-compliant, service options to arrive soon courtesy of recent DVD Copy Control Association moves.