Mechanics of .wmv file with license

[CookingWithGas]

Today I paid for and downloaded a video of a baseball game from mlb.com. The file is a .wmv file, with a license. It is the first time I have dealt with such a file. When you open the file in Windows Media Viewer, it prompts for your userid and password and then authenticates back to the MLB site and loads the license. Then your license can be stored locally. On subsequent invocations you are no longer prompted.

I tried to use my Nero software to burn a DVD so I could watch the game on TV instead of being stuck behind my computer. But Nero just gave me an error message when I tried to add the file to the DVD. The error message gave no diagnostic, just said error loading the file.

My hypothesis is that the error is related to the licensing. Is the licensing a copy protection scheme, or just to authenticate that you paid for it? That is, is a licensed video file explicitly prohibited from burning to DVD?

Please note that I am not asking how to cirumvent copy protection or do anything else illegal, just trying to find out if it is possible to legally burn this file to a video DVD.

[CookingWithGas]

I’m going to give myself a bump here during prime time, assuming that the zillions of people who can answer this were all playing video games or something last night.

[mhendo]

Check out MLB’s FAQ for video files.

10. Can I burn a DDS game to DVD and watch them on my TV?

You can burn a DDS game onto a DVD, but only as a storage medium for computer files, not as a “TV quality” DVD. You can use your computer to write a DDS 350K Windows Media file to a data DVD (DVD-ROM) for storage (similar to writing to a CD for storage) so you don’t have to keep it on your computer’s hard drive. However, this is very different than a DVD-Video DVD (such as a motion picture DVD) that you view in high-resolution on your TV screen. DDS files are computer screen-resolution Windows Media files; DVDs that you watch on your TV are higher-resolution MPEG-2 format files.

In particular, it’s important to understand the purpose of DVD recordable drives (DVD burners) for computers: these recorders can store data; creating full-featured DVD-Videos requires additional software to do video encoding (MPEG), audio encoding (Dolby Digital, MPEG, or PCM), navigation and control data generation, and so on.

So it appears that you can’t actually make a DVD out of the file; the only way you could watch it on TV is if your DVD player will actually play .wmv files.

That is, you can only burn the video as a data file to the disc, but can’t actually turn it into the necessary .vob files that make up regular DVDs.

I think the whole DRM thing sucks, and is one reason why i’m reluctant to buy any downloadable videos from MLB. I’d also prefer that they offer them in a non-proprietary format like .mpg or .avi, so that they could then be burned to DVD.

[CookingWithGas]

Thanks. I had reviewed their FAQs before posting, and saw the one you quoted. At first I thought they were saying that you couldn’t do it, but this part

Videos requires additional software to do video encoding (MPEG), audio encoding (Dolby Digital, MPEG, or PCM), navigation and control data generation, and so on.

sounds like they mean you can if you have the encoding software, which I do. I figured that this whole section was for the benefit of someone who knew absolutely nothing about creating DVDs, who might otherwise try to copy the file to a DVD then not understand why it wouldn’t play on their DVD player.