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DRM Reduces Battery Life
gr8_phk writes "An interesting article
over at C|Net claims that playing DRMed music can reduce battery life up to 25 percent. Yet another reason to stick with plain old MP3 files." From the article: "Those who belong to subscription services such as Napster or Rhapsody have it worse. Music rented from these services arrive in the WMA DRM 10 format, and it takes extra processing power to ensure that the licenses making the tracks work are still valid and match up to the device itself. Heavy DRM not only slows down an MP3 player but also sucks the very life out of them."
Mp3, as it turns out, is a lot easier to decode than wma and other later-generation formats. The fact that you have to use mpeg4 or wma with your DRMed purchase is just an unwanted side-effect.
That said, it is one reason I only play mp3s on my portable player. LAME has brought a level of quality to the mp3 format that none thought possible, and it keeps up suprisingly well with "more advanced" codecs. I see no reason to use anything else...it plays everywhere, and uses less battery life.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
I think the problem comes from the decryption step. DRMed formats don't just have some license bits on the front, they also encrypt the rest of the payload to insure that nobody can just come by and rewrite (or erase) the license info.
I read the internet for the articles.
'More advanced compression algorithms use more power[1]' doesn't work quite so well as a headline though, does it?
[1] Even more when you need more disk accesses.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Something worth mentioning here too is the effect playing .ogg files has on battery life. It completely kills it in comparison to similar mp3s. My non-ipod player does .ogg among other formats, and I bought it for the purpose of playing .oggs, and if the majority of the music I listen to is ogg I get under 2/3 the battery life, closer to half, compared to listening to the majority as mp3. It's a very cpu intensive compression scheme which compresses better and sounds better than mp3 or AAC IMHO, but pays for it with CPU use. Even iPod Linux with dual 80MHz ARM cores inside each iPod to play with has trouble coping with oggs because of the cpu use needed to decode them.
Anyway their "study" is deeply flawed, and while it could be argued that DRM does actually cause your player to consume more battery life than it otherwise would, DRM is not making the power impact they claim and anyone giving the problem more than even five seconds of rational thought would realize this.
... the MP3 codec is still likely going to be the most power efficient.
.01% of the population rather than pretty much everyone who is already using MP3's.
That depends, when you say rational thought, would you consider the scientific method to be rational?
The codec is the problem. It takes more power to decode WMA (DRM or not) than it does to decode MP3. Ditto for AAC
I agree this is probably true. Yet still supports my below points.
A proper study would have compared identical tracks with identical compression with and without DRM such as an iTunes track played on repeat vs the same track with DRM stripped out played the same way.
Incorrect.
In any scientific process you must have a control group. In this case, they picked the most popular format which is the most widely compatible, most used, and has been out the longest: MP3 CBR. Why should the control group be forced to use a proprietary format which is not readilly available for use and is not going to be used in the real world? If you set the control group to be WMA or AAC files in the same bitrate which you download off music stores, you would be covering likely less than 1% of all music being used on portable players (because you won't find many people using non-drm WMA or AAC files on ipods and mp3 players)
You missed the point of the article completely. It doesn't matter if the AAC or WMA DRM encryption takes up more processor power than non DRM AAC or WMA files. Or if they use the same. What matters is that when you are listening to an MP3 in the control group (which covers somewhere around 99% of all nonDRM music on portable players), and then you downlaod the same song on iTunes or walmart.com, and the battery life goes to 8%-25% less.
Nobody in their right mind would use AAC or WMA for non-encrpyted files, so why would that be the only fair comparrison? WMA/AAC files do not work in most DVD players. WMA/AAC files do not work in most in-dash mp3 players in cars. WMA/AAC files do not work on most portable devices such as phones and PDA's. WMA/AAC files do not work on almost ANYTHING other than their respective x86/PPC operating system/applications combinations and their respective portable players (Sandisk/Creative -> plays4sure and ipod -> Fairplay)
Sure, you could make a control group which uses WMA files and then compare it to the variant group which uses DRM WMA files, but then you would be focusing your study on about
Your ignorance is infinitely greater than you realize.
I own a Sony Hi-MD Music Player. I bought this unit before the rootkit fiasco, and to be honest is one of the best purchases I've made in electronics.
I bought this because I'm a clutz with electronics. In 2001 I changed cell phones 4 times. All of them I misplaced, lost or utterly destroyed. I'm lucky that my employer changed them every time. So I figured that my music player should have very few moving parts. Back then flash players were a bit limited. The iPod Nano was at least 8 months away.
So far my experience has been good, if you set aside that Sony's first Connect software was utter trash. The current version (3.4) is quite good. I don't buy music online from Sony, or from iTunes for that matter. Most of my burning I do from my own collection, and some Podcasts. Often, the software won't transfer MP3's to the discs but this happens 90% of the time on Podcasts
The player takes a single AA battery. This often lasts for up to two+ weeks under normal use (e.g.: Bus/Train to and from work, at work). I don't know what kind of processing power the unit has but I don't think it's too much.
And in case you're wondering, I get 1GB per Hi-MD disc (350MB per normal MiniDisc). I've squeezed 20+ CD's in a single Hi-MD.
the future is but past forgotten
The iPod doesn't use a CPU to decode anything it plays; it's all done by an ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuit) which handles the mp3, AAC, WAV, Apple-lossless, etc decompression.
I suspect that the power used to decode equal-bitrate MP3 and AAC files is imperceptible...
Please help metamoderate.
3287 flac files on my PC.
Avg size 27.6859Mb.
FWIW, using:
find -name *.flac -printf "%s\n" | awk '{c=c+1;s=s+$1} END {print c,s/c/1024/1024}'