DRM Does/Doesn’t Shorten Player Life
CDFreaks makes the ridiculous claim that DRM shortens an mp3 player’s life by 25%, which I find silly. To that end, I am going to perform the following three tests on my new Creative Vision M mp3 player to give a factual refutation of this claim:
- Playing 1 ~4m mp3 file on loop until the device dies
- Playing 1 ~4m wma file on loop until the device dies
- Playing 1 ~4m wma DRM protected file on loop until the device dies
These tests will take a few days to complete. Here are the results:
- 11 hours 37 minutes (02/18/2006 2:11 PM to 1:48 AM)
- 10 hours 08 minutes (02/19/2006 2:38 PM to 12:46 AM)
- 8 hours 55 minutes (02/21/2006 8:50 AM to 5:45 PM)
Going from MP3 to WMA at the same bitrate costs you about 10% battery life. Going from unrestricted WMA to WMA protected by DRM costs another 10% battery life, or 2.7 hours compared to MP3–24% of the maximum possible.
However, I think the following chart, which compares the percent change between formats, to be more telling:
There are two disparate effects here:
- WMA v.s. MP3
- DRM v.s. Unrestricted Media
The results of this test show that
- WMA uses battery 12% faster than MP3
- DRM uses battery 12% faster than Unrestricted Media
The glaring error that the media made was to unfairly associate both factors (Format and DRM) with the issue of Digital Rights Management. When you look at the variables independently, it’s only half as bad as reported.
Related Stories:
Eliot, Eliott, Elliot, and Elliott s of the World UNITE!
I got the following cool email today:
I just stumbled on to your blog via someone’s installation of your hashcash plugin. I was wondering what in the world hash cash was and then got distracted by your blog (that I had to read via Google’s cache because your site seems to be unreachable this morning). I just had to email someone who has (almost) the same name as me. And, we also share a similar goal! One of my goals in life is to be known as just “Eliot” without the use of my last name. I love how infrequently I meet other Eliot’s (or Elliot’s or Elliott’s) and I’ve even rarely met someone who knew another Eliot (or Elliot or Elliott). I want to take advantage of that and become like Madonna or Prince or Beck. A one-name wonder, you might say.
Yes, being named Elliott is indeed pretty cool. We’re not named for ET–think T.S. Eliot. And, even cooler, is that any of us can be effectively named E(l+)iot(+) without difficulty. Elllliotttttttttts of the world, unite!
For those of you who don’t know the origin or history of the name Eliot, try this list of people by surname El from wikipedia, or read about how Eliot derives from Hebrew Elijah, meaning “The Lord is my God.”
And, contrary to popular opinion, it’s a statistically significant American name:
Elliot is a common male first name, ranking 582 out of 1219 for males of all ages in the 1990 U.S. Census. Elliot is a very popular surname, ranking 1841 out of 88799 for people of all ages in the 1990 U.S. Census.
Update: Did you know that Elyot is another variant of this name? It’s a rare spelling from the 16th century!
Happy Pi Day!
Today is PI day, March 14th (3/14). On PI day, there are a few things people often do to celebrate:
- Eat pie
- Da pai (play cards)
- Watch the movie Pi
- Recite digits of ? from memory
- Sing “Oh, number Pi
Oh, number Pi
Your digits are unending,
Oh, number Pi
Oh, number Pi
No pattern are you sending.
You’re three point one four one five nine,
And even more if we had time,
Oh, number Pi
Oh, number Pi
For circle lengths unbending. “
pi is approximately 3.1415926535897932384 62643383279502884197 1693993751058209749445923 0781640628620899862803482 53421170679821480865132823 0664709384460955058223172 53594081284811174502841027 0193852110555964462 294895493038196, and is related to the area of a circle by the equation A= ? * r2. Approximations to pi were made by Babylonians using pi = 25/8, and early Biblical figures who used the value 3. The best three digit rational approximation is 355/113. For more information, see this history page.