Heise: Last year, Hollywood studios and technology firms reached an agreement for the storage of films downloaded legally from the Internet onto DVDs using the CSS encryption standard. At the end of January, the DVD Forum’s steering committee approved specification 1.0 of the “DVD-R for CSS Managed Recording” (also known as “Recordable CSS”). Furthermore, the steering committee also approved an official logo for legal movie downloads that can be burned onto “DVD-R for CSS Managed Recording.”
Although the CSS encryption system was cracked years ago, the industry apparently believes it is still sufficiently secure to keep most users from making illegal copies.
Legal download services like in2movies have been struggling because the movies they provide in the Windows Media format do not run on standalone DVD players. CinemaNow has been using the fluxDVD for some time; its protection mechanism allows disks burned at home to be played on stand-alone units but protects the discs from being read out by means of flawed sectors.
This approach has also already been cracked, but at least it does not force consumers to buy new burners and special blank disks that are probably more expensive, as “Recordable CSS” does. It remains to be seen whether potential customers will buy an extra burner that supports “DVD-R for CSS Managed Recording.”