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

Bullshit

[mobby_6kl]

I noticed this story on digg earlier today, but I'll comment here instead.

As much as I hate DRM, this whole comparison & conclusion is bullshit. They compare DRM'd WMA and AAC to MP3. From what I've noticed from using my underclocked pda, MP3 is much less processor intensive then (warezed, DRM-free) WMAs at the same bitrate. Even if you don't believe me (and I can't be bothered to look for sources), this is still a possibility they didn't address.

misleading article

[fugu]

The article compares MP3 to DRM'ed WMA and MP3 to DRM'ed AAC. Of course the battery life is going to be different, different formats require more or less processing power to decode. For this to be valid they need to compare WMA with and without DRM, or AAC with and without DRM.

Apples to Apples : Oranges to Oranges

[jokewallpaper]

From The Cult Of Mac Blog" http://blog.wired.com/cultofmac:

But as one commentator on the story points out, the test compared protected WMA files with unprotected MP3 files. It should have compared protected-WMA to unprotected WMA, or Apple's FairPlay AAC versus unprotected AAC.

Re:Misleading Headline: 8% vs 25%

[Keeper]

The quality of a 192kbps WMA file is far, far superior to that of a 128kbps mp3.