Windows Media Player is Dead To Me
This is totally unrelated to games, except in the most tangential way.
Last night, I decided to listen to music while playing WoW on the Media Center. It’s one of the few advantages of playing on a (relative to most monitors) low-resolution screen: all my music is on the Media Center. Almost the first thing I did when I got the Media Center was to rip every CD I own — so I’ve got hundreds of hours of legally purchased music on its hard drive.
But Windows Media Player claims I don’t have a sound card installed. It plays an alert sound while telling me this, for added hilarity.
I dig around in various options and settings, but everything seems to be working. I can still watch TV with sound through the sound card; I can still play games with sound. What I can’t do is play mp3 or wmv files.
Finally, I click on ‘Web Help’ in the error dialog. Something jumps out at me: Secure Audio Path. It’s DRM technology integrated into Windows that basically says: if your card’s drivers aren’t certified by Microsoft as protecting the interests of our sugardaddies at the RIAA and MPAA, you can’t listen to music.
Or, at least, you can’t listen to music using Windows Media Player or whatever variant is included in Windows Media Center.
Once upon a time, I was a die-hard WinAmp user. But as WMP gained features and became more like a real piece of software, I was lured away.
Hello again, WinAmp. It looks like, until Windows integrates this bullshit at the hardware level, you and I are going to be friends again.
Note the property rights implications in my story: I own the computer. I own the music. I own the software I’m attempting to use to play the music. And yet I cannot play the music, because someone, somewhere, is worried that I might have stolen an mp3 of ‘Baby Got Back’. So, in fact, what I really own here is an inert lump of metal, silicon, and plastic, and the only guaranteed use to which I can put it is as a doorstop.
DRM is going to be the dividing issue of the next decade. And unless the lobbyists for the content industries can come up with solutions that don’t make me, the legitimate consumer, want to see them strung up on rusty barbed wire by their large intestines, it’s a war they cannot possibly win.
If, on the off chance, someone at MS responsible for this bullshit reads this post — I know, not likely, they’re busy inventing new ways to rape babies — please drop me a line so I can tell you what I really think of your DRM solutions.