We tend to be very protective of content: I recorded it, I paid for it, I own it, and it’s mine. Keep your bloody paws off or I’ll beat you about the head and shoulders. (Or something similar, maybe not so violent if you’re not so predisposed.) The problem is this miserable digital age in which we live where the dictates of the MPAA and RIAA constantly challenges us to that concept. Even if we shell out the cash for a CD or DVD, for example, all we’ve purchased is the right to watch it or listen to it.

As we shift to an online posture for our viewing and listening habits, the situation becomes even more dire: You don’t even get a disc and, if something should be placed on your hard drive temporarily, it’s gone at the whim of the provider.

Plextor, and a few other optical drive manufacturers, are selling Qflix enabled optical drives. Plextor’s version, the PX-Q840U external variant, arrived at the Lab of Doom & Pepsi Cola in December of last year but it’s taken me this long to install it (no time at all for that) and get a good enough conceptual grasp of the product to hopefully get it right (a lot of time).

Rather than repeat the obvious, here’s Plextor’s take on the drive:

Get More from Your Downloaded Content
With Plextor’s External USB PX-Q840U Qflix™ enabled DVD drive, creating your own personal movie library is simple. From your desktop, use Roxio Venue™ — a rich, user-friendly application — to connect directly to CinemaNow for easy purchase and download, organization, and burning of your favorite hit movies and TV shows to DVD. In addition, the PX-Q840U is a multi-function (20X DVD+/-RW with double layer write capabilities). With a Plextor drive and Qflix™, you have a complete entertainment PC.

Qflix allows DVD-on-Demand
Qflix drives and media make downloading and burning your favorite movies and TV titles as simple. Included with the purchase of a Qflix drive is Roxio Venue – a rich, user-friendly application that connects directly to CinemaNow for easy purchase and download, organization, and burning of hit movies to DVD. Select your favorite movies online and then simply insert Qflix media into the Qflix drive and click to copy and create your own personal entertainment library. Watch your favorite movies anytime, anywhere.

There’s more and you can visit Plextor’s site to soak in all of the details.

The crux of it is that if you have a drive, like the PX-Q840U, that’s been built with the Qflix spec inside, you can view, download, and burn DVD titles using the included Roxio Venue software onto Qflix enabled discs. There’s no expiration on the DVD you’ve burned. It takes a little while to do the physical burning –it always does—but, when you’re done, it’s yours. And that sounds like the best of all worlds.

The external version of the drive will set you back, currently, about $110 at Newegg. That’s a bit steep for an external optical drive. Keep in mind, however, that Plextor provides you with a $25 coupon toward the purchase of a movie. Ka-ching! We’re down to $85 in real life. There are also two free Qflix blank discs in the box. They’re about $1.20 each, again at Newegg. Now we’re at about $82.60 and that’s quite palatable for an upscale external drive –whether it’s Qflix-capable or not.

But here come the problems –and none of them have anything to do with the drive…

The standard $9.95 Qflix titles are terrible. (All right, if you’re a Goth or incredibly dull and/or morbid, you might enjoy some of them but they all appear to be “B” movies that spent a week in the theater and then were consigned to the closet.) CinemaNow also offers some very nice movies. In fact, right after I setup the PX-Q840U I discovered that the latest Batman movie was available for $19.95. Not a bad deal, I thought, until I stopped by my local Shop & Stop and saw the same DVD on sale for the same price. Huh?

So then I started to think –and that’s always a dangerous thing for me to do and surely something that no sane product manufacturer wants either…

Without the need to actually put a movie on disc, with no packaging, distribution, or promotional costs, these movies should be a dime a dozen. All right, maybe no more than $5 each in my opinion. All of the associated costs are mine, not the studios’. I supply the media and the interest in buying them. What’s happening is that they’re being assigned a perceived value and it’s not based on my perception. Some reasonable advice: If you want a service such as this to survive –and perhaps thrive—don’t saddle the titles with outrageous pricing. Slash them at least 50% from what they sell for on the shelves. That creates the perception of value. You really can’t have it both ways.

As for the PX-Q840U; it’s quite fast, it burns and burns and burns without a hiccup (or so mine did); and the slick piano-black case is a real eye-catcher, especially sitting next to the minimalist contour of my Skeleton-housed PC. My best advice is to hunt down the lowest price for the PX-Q840U that you can find, use up the $25 coupon and the Qflix discs, and then don’t bother about CinemaNow again until they figure out a better approach to the whole marketing thing.

Thumbs up for Plextor. For Qflix, well, I’m sitting on my thumbs over that concept for now.