Technology helps Hollywood control burning

Sonic Solutions has come up with a way to help Hollywood studios and other providers of video content distribute their movies over the Internet without fear of rampant, illegal DVD burning.

Qflix is a new technology and intellectual property (IP) licensing program designed to enable legal, secure and reliable burning of video content distributed over the Internet to DVDs, which can be played on standard and high-definition players, Sonic said Thursday.

The system uses Content Scramble System (CCS) encryption, which is backed by numerous studios, TV stations and other content creators. CCS serves as a type of lock. It can be opened by a CCS decryption module, or CCS key, already installed in most DVD players.

On top of that, Qflix provides a studio-backed copyrights-protection program which includes certification testing and an intellectual property license pool to enable disc and drive manufacturers to create products for recording CCS-encrypted video.

The Qflix brand will appear on compatible discs, drives and video download services as a symbol for consumers looking for legitimate and reliable “purchase, download and burn” offerings, Sonic said.

Pricing information was not available.

Sonic will be demonstrating its system at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas next week.