DRM Shortens Battery Life by 25%

By | March 16th, 2006 comments icon (1)Comments


microsoft playsforsure logoI’m not a social scientist, but I think it’s funny how people who have a disdain for certain products, services, or people look for every conceivable way to discredit them (sometimes justly). Case in point: Tests reveal DRM shortens battery life by 25% in portable music players (via Digg, CD Freaks). The bottom line is that DRM-wrapped digital media takes up more CPU horsepower to playback because the player needs to decrypt files on the fly. Makes sense… and adds another reason to people’s list of why “DRM is evil.”





Filed in: Industry Buzz

  • http://www.msmvps.com/chrisl/ ChrisL01

    No doubt that decryption requires more MIPS, the worst part is that WMA itself already requires more MIPS to decode. The more complex your compression/encryption is, the more instructions it will take to decode, the less battery life you get.