Pioneer intros DVR-2920Q and DVR-X162Q Qflix-enabled DVD burners

Ah, Qflix. That snazzy burn technology that enables users to toast CinemaNow flicks onto specially-keyed blank DVD media for playback in your DVD player. For the eight people out there that still find this appealing, Pioneer is looking to compete with a handful of rivals by introducing the internal DVR-2920Q and external DVR-X162Q DVD / CD writers, both of which are Qflix-enabled. Each drive is also bundled with Roxio Venue software to facilitate the whole download-to-DVD process, and the Roxio CinePlayer will allow you to play back the resulting disc right on your PC (should you so choose). Mum's the word on a price / release date, but the pair ought to be hitting soon enough.

[(Unverified) Posted Oct 22nd 2008 10:12AM]

Yeah, this Internet thing's a fad anyway. Who's going to want to download and burn something when they can just go to Amazon, buy the title, and then get the movie within 5 days, or five years, depending on whether the title is out of print?

More seriously: CSS (and AACS, and BD+ especially) is dumb, but Hollywood seems to be unwilling to support anything unless it has some fig-leaf of content control on it. If this means they'll be more willing to provide a download system where people can BUY the movies they download and get a permanent copy at the end of the day, it's a good thing.

The only criticism I'd make is that it isn't hi-def. Yet. If Toshiba hadn't screwed up, we'd have had hi-def download-and-burn systems already, but alas, they made the most minimal HD DVD players imaginable and now we have to suffer without a viable HD format.

[(Unverified) Posted Oct 22nd 2008 1:47PM]

This could be an interesting product. If DVD Download had dual layer and decided to support mpeg4, they could sell a low bit rate 720p encode with a low bit rate DD+ sound track and claim it as HD.

Talk about a huge step backwards, but I suppose 720p with lossy sound is good enough for those that don't know any better

[(Unverified) Posted Oct 22nd 2008 2:06PM]

There'd be little to play it on at this stage. The idea here is you get a "real" DVD once you've burnt it, that'll play in any DVD player.

Theoretically someone can produce a DVD burner that supports CPRM and burn HD in HD DVD format (this would be a 3X DVD) with it, but the only people who'd be able to watch the resultant 3X DVDs would be people with HD DVD players.

Wouldn't be hard for Blu-ray players to support 3X DVD as an optional standard (and would be nice in many ways), but the last I heard things were so bad between the DVD Forum and BDA that Sony actually will not pick up packages sent by the DVD Forum. No, I'm serious, they keep returning them unopened (http://www.dvdforum.org/sc-letter-voting-40-41.htm) In addition, the last meeting included a proposal to promote the HD DVD format for red laser players and while the proposal technically passed, it was opposed by such a large proportion of the industry it's unlikely to result in any actual players being created or discs being pressed.

All of which is a shame. 720p with fairly decent sound (two hours of FR DTS is about 2G) should fit pretty easily on a dual layer disc. And the length of time to download ought to mean that 8.5Gb is actually a pretty decent upper limit for a download and burn system anyway.

[(Unverified) Posted Oct 22nd 2008 2:08PM]

There'd be little to play it on at this stage. The idea here is you get a "real" DVD once you've burnt it, that'll play in any DVD player.

Theoretically someone can produce a DVD burner that supports CPRM and burn HD in HD DVD format (this would be a 3X DVD) with it, but the only people who'd be able to watch the resultant 3X DVDs would be people with HD DVD players.

Wouldn't be hard for Blu-ray players to support 3X DVD as an optional standard (and would be nice in many ways), but the last I heard things were so bad between the DVD Forum and BDA that Sony actually will not pick up packages sent by the DVD Forum. No, I'm serious, they keep returning them unopened (check the 40th-41st letter voting entry on the DVD Forum website as an example. Engadget's highly professional and never wrong forum software is preventing me from posting a link.) In addition, the last meeting included a proposal to promote the HD DVD format for red laser players and while the proposal technically passed, it was opposed by such a large proportion of the industry it's unlikely to result in any actual players being created or discs being pressed.

All of which is a shame. 720p with fairly decent sound (two hours of FR DTS is about 2G) should fit pretty easily on a dual layer disc. And the length of time to download ought to mean that 8.5Gb is actually a pretty decent upper limit for a download and burn system anyway.