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."

Comments

Not because of DRM

[default luser]

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.

Re:DRM suxx0rs

[jandrese]

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.

Re:Huh?

[TheRaven64]

Not even a remotely fair test. They compared 128Kb/s MP3s to DRM'd WMAs (at 192Kb/s) and AACs (at 128Kb/s). Since both WMA and AAC are significantly newer and use more advanced compression algorithms, they take more CPU power to decode. More CPU load means more power used. If they had compared DRM'd AAC against AAC then this might have been interesting, but they didn't.

'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.

Re:Argh

[mp3phish]

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.

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 ... the MP3 codec is still likely going to be the most power efficient.

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 .01% of the population rather than pretty much everyone who is already using MP3's.