DRM Woes
I am not someone who is exactly against DRM, for the most part I don't mind it. I buy stuff from the Apple Store all the time and haven't been too affected by the DRM.
I did encounter some issues with it today however. Though, overall, it hasn't been too bad, I was annoyed by what I did deal with.
I installed a new CPU in my computer yesterday finally. Last year I purchased tons of new parts for my computer, but I kept the same CPU I had previously. I now have replaced my older Pentium D dual core with a Q9400 quad core chip. This is a massive improvement and am very happy with it. However, I have came up with two DRM issues that I believe are related to the change in hardware on my machine. It seems to be likely that the DRM is using the serial number in the CPU as at least one identifier.
The first thing I noticed was when I went to sync my iPod Touch. I had added an app to it earlier in the day when I was at work. When it went to sync, it told me it couldn't transfer the app to my computer as the computer wasn't authorized for it. It asked me for my login information to authorize the machine, and after I entered it, it said I was already authorized. Of course, the error still continued when I tried to re-sync. This problem was easily fixed though. I just had to deauthorize my computer, and then authorize it again, and then everything was working fine.
The next issue came later in the night and that I haven't really fixed. I went to watch a show using Netflix Watch Instantly and the moment I hit 'Play', it would go to the page when the video would normally start playing and Internet Explorer would simply crash. I use this almost daily and the problem didn't start until yesterday. That uses DRM as well, so I can only imagine that the CPU change has messed up the DRM for Netflix. I tried reinstalling the Netflix application, but it didn't fix anything. I will get more into this in a separate blog post, but I have now learned there is a new player that uses Microsoft Silverlight and that is working fine.
DRM is slowly going away, but I imagine it will always be around in some fashion. I would hope that any DRM scheme would at least have some consideration that any hardware in a computer could change and there should at least be some way to reset the DRM easily after that change. iTunes did it well, though the errors it gave could have been more helpful.
I did encounter some issues with it today however. Though, overall, it hasn't been too bad, I was annoyed by what I did deal with.
I installed a new CPU in my computer yesterday finally. Last year I purchased tons of new parts for my computer, but I kept the same CPU I had previously. I now have replaced my older Pentium D dual core with a Q9400 quad core chip. This is a massive improvement and am very happy with it. However, I have came up with two DRM issues that I believe are related to the change in hardware on my machine. It seems to be likely that the DRM is using the serial number in the CPU as at least one identifier.
The first thing I noticed was when I went to sync my iPod Touch. I had added an app to it earlier in the day when I was at work. When it went to sync, it told me it couldn't transfer the app to my computer as the computer wasn't authorized for it. It asked me for my login information to authorize the machine, and after I entered it, it said I was already authorized. Of course, the error still continued when I tried to re-sync. This problem was easily fixed though. I just had to deauthorize my computer, and then authorize it again, and then everything was working fine.
The next issue came later in the night and that I haven't really fixed. I went to watch a show using Netflix Watch Instantly and the moment I hit 'Play', it would go to the page when the video would normally start playing and Internet Explorer would simply crash. I use this almost daily and the problem didn't start until yesterday. That uses DRM as well, so I can only imagine that the CPU change has messed up the DRM for Netflix. I tried reinstalling the Netflix application, but it didn't fix anything. I will get more into this in a separate blog post, but I have now learned there is a new player that uses Microsoft Silverlight and that is working fine.
DRM is slowly going away, but I imagine it will always be around in some fashion. I would hope that any DRM scheme would at least have some consideration that any hardware in a computer could change and there should at least be some way to reset the DRM easily after that change. iTunes did it well, though the errors it gave could have been more helpful.