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Though it's too soon to gauge the market's response, even in this era of instant polling (Zogby and Rasmussen Reports have been too busy tracking the presidential campaigns to get us any hard data on Qflix), the same day the drive debuted I was fortunate enough to get my hands on a review unit and test its performance. You'd think there would be little new to say about a DVD burner's performance these days, and as a general-purpose 16X DVD/CD burner, the PLDS-manufactured Qflix drive does all you'd hope it would--well, everything except copy a Qflix DVD. But we'll get to that. Although I see the real potential in Qflix's success on a hardware level coming via internal burners that arrive as factory-installed components of Dell laptops and desktops (in much the way my last three laptops have come with LightScribe drives, even though I don't recall asking forthem), the first Qflix drive is an external USB 2.0 model that lists for $120. My unit shipped with three blank single-side, single-layer Ritek-branded Qflix discs with the CSS Video logo, certified for 2X-8X recording; and a Roxio Venue software suite including Venue, CinePlayer, and CinemaNow Media Manager, all of which installed without incident. My review drive didn't come with any general-purpose DVD burning application, but Sonic says the bundle Dell sells will include the typical limited OEM version of Roxio Easy Media Creator, which is welcome news. Since part of the pitch is that this drive doubles as an everyday DVD burner, it makes sense to ship it with some software that handles everyday burning tasks--especially at that $120 price point, which is well on the high side for an external DVD/CD recorder. The heart of the Qflix-specific part of the suite is Roxio Venue 1.1, which launches right into the Download to DVD interface (see below). It's straightforward and easy-to-use, and much more like browsing a movie-rental website like Netflix than navigating a DVD recording interface. Truth be told it's hard to tell where Roxio Venue ends and CinemaNow Media Manager begins; you're working with the CinemaNow catalog right away and moving right into the movie selection process from the moment you open the Venue application. The first thing you see are "Newest Releases"; if you don't see what you want there, you can browse by genre (Comedy, Drama, Action, Thriller, Family). You can also sort your own library of films purchased.
The only bump in the road I found working wirh Venue is that CinemaNow's current DVD selection is so small. If you don't find a movie you want after browsing through the first few screens in a given genre, it's probably not there. Sonic says many more titles will be in place by the holiday season, and given that the "download to burn" phase of CinemaNow's existence only kicked in two weeks ago, it's fair to say this business is in its infancy and assume it has quite a bit of growth ahead of it. To test the Qflix/Venue/CinemaNow download-to-burn apparatus, I sorted through the Newest Releases and selected the 2007 western 3:10 to Yuma for download. For $9.95 I was promised a movie that would play in "any DVD player and up to 3 desktops or laptops." After registering and selecting payment, followed by a confirmation page, the download began immediately. Less than 30 seconds after the download began, I received a message saying I could start watching the movie. This strikes me as a very cool feature for the instant-gratification crowd, a demographic that I'd estimate has, roughly, a 100% overlap with those consumers who might gravitate toward download-to-burn entertainment purchases.
The 3:10 to Yuma download-to-burn experience clocked in at 91 minutes, and the DVD played fine in my Sony DVD player, with video quality that appeared equivalent to a typical replicated Hollywood DVD. The disc included no menus but chapter marks every 10 minutes. In part because Qflix is currently limited to single-layer discs, Qflix movie downloads will, at least for the time being, be movie-only, with none of the extras associated with DVDs rented or purchased on replicated media. One option that seems to be offered in the Roxio Venue software but not supported by the CinemaNow site is disc-labeling, which if nothing else is a reminder that Qflix technology has kiosks and other non-single-user-PC applications in its future. A subsequent download of The Spiderwick Chronicles yielded a near-identical result (although, with the film being 30 minutes shorter, the download/burn time was closer to 65 minutes) to the 3:10 to Yuma experience, even with the film playing simultaneously, during download, in both the Roxio Venue and CinemaNow Media Manager windows (see below), though I'm not entirely sure why anyone would want to do that. It occurred to me during the Spiderwick Chronicles download to try and burn the movie to a non-Qflix (and thus non-CSS protected) DVD+R disc. No dice.
You have three options for burning a Qflix disc: 2X, 4X, and 8X. You can also run a BurnRight test to make sure your system is up to the challenge of downloading and burning a Qflix movie (below). Apparently, my 2.2GHz DuoCore Sony laptop with 3GB of functional system RAM was deemed Qflix-worthy. (Minimum system requirements include a 2.5GHz Pentium 4+ with 1GB RAM running Windows XP or Vista with WMP 10+, IE 6.0+, Java JRE, and 5-10GB available hard disk space.)
The final test, after the burn was completed and the discs' playback performance, was to see if the discs could be copied my conventional means. We all know CSS was cracked nine years ago by a Norwegian teenager who wanted to play DVD movies on his Linux machine even though there was no Linux player available commercially at the time. Since then, CSS has been more effective at deterring copying than preventing it. Cleverly, the movie studios have been able to extend the viability of DVD copy protection by adding red herring title sets and the like that stymie some DVD rippers and keep would-be pirates playing catch-up, although it remains an ongoing game of advance and retreat. But the key issue in the development Qflix has not been so much whether CSS is foolproof as whether it's good enough to get the major studios on board with Qflix technology, which does seem to be the case. In any event, I attempted to dupe the 3:10 to Yuma disc from the internal drive in my laptop to the Qflix drive using the Copy Disc utility in Roxio Easy Media Creator and was rebuffed exactly as I would be if I tried to copy a replicated DVD-Video title using the same application (see below).
At this very early stage in the open-for-business life of Qflix, it's safe to say that the burners, media, and software driving the technology are doing their part to make it viable. Whether consumers accept the idea that they'll need to use specific media and drives to join the Qflix club remains to be seen, as does CinemaNow's ability to get its download-to-burn catalog up to a respectable level. Is "Their World Closer Than You Think," as the Spiderwick Chronicles tagline warns? Time will tell. Stephen Nathans-Kelly (stephen.nathans at infotoday.com) is editor-in-chief of EMedialive and EventDV.
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