An anonymous optical disc R&D Engineer has been investigating the CinemaNow burn to DVD service which was recently announced and found it incredibly flawed. This is the offering that will allow learners to download a film over the Internet legally and burn it to DVD.

The Engineer discovered that the specification that they plan to use has been designed incredibly badly and that it is likely that DVD's created using this specification will fail to play in most DVD players.

According to the story in Boing Boing:

The system is based on the deliberate introduction of errors caused by Digital Sum Value (DSV), a sum that represents the ratio of land to pits on the surface of the DVD. The DVD spec notes the possibility of DSV errors and instructs implementers to take care to avoid them, as these errors can cause a host of problems with reading and playing discs.

The Engineer tells BB that this is an uncontrollable process and that the location and rate of errors could fluctuate across the disc. Then add in the vast array of players, chipsets and software, and the possiblity of scratches and dirt, and you'll have a high rate of failure.

It's interesting because many of the DVD's I receive through the rental company I am with are unplayable on my high end DVD player, but through the PS2 they almost always play (with a wee wash first). Those that don't play on the PS2 play on the GB £29 Internet purchased DVD player!

The Engineer carried out some tests, and the news is not so good. He tried creating discs with this specification on a variety of test equipment and found that many of the tests failed completely, and most of those successful gave unplayable, error-ridden discs.

For the "successful," marginally playable discs, the news is still bad, since those discs will already be at the limit of their players' error-correction threshold, so that minor scratches and dust would render them useless.

The Engineer sums it all up quite nicely:

"I'm against people being fleeced by this kind of crap. How can you sell someone content on media that is so heavily compromised, especially on a format that so heavily relies upon its error correction system to maintain playability? It's mind boggling!"

BB also carry an update from the site tian.cc, they attempted to test the service and found it to be awful. They eventually managed to burn a DVD successfully and found it easy to override the DVD protection allowing a purchaser to create more than one copy. He also brings up some other interesting points. Firstly the pricing, having to pay for the movie and your own disc to burn to makes the pricing somewhat unattractive...

...I do not see the incentive of having the user to do all the work yet still paying $10 for a movie that is over 3 years old. A quick check in Amazon.com, the same movie in original DVD format is only $6.86 new, and used version is as low as $1.99...

...In order to burn more than one copy of the downloaded material, all users have to do is run the initial copy of DVD through softwares like DVD Decrypter or DVD Shrink, then the same copy can be reproduced into unlimited copies.

Interesting, it's that easy. Reading all this news makes me think one thing, rushed. It looks like the technology people in the background have rushed through something in order to be early, and no one has looked to the consumer to see what would benefit them and what they would want to do with a downloaded movie.

Rather than be first they should sit back, find out what the users want, and find an innovative, reliable and safe (for their content protection) way of getting the DVD's onto the discs.

They should also have spent some time on the costs as well, working out what is an acceptable and attractive price for the consumer. After all, if I can buy it cheaper already burnt on DVD with a nice cover, holder and possibly inset, of course I'm buying that version.

Not the revelation that we thought it might be.