I picked up an episode of a TV show off the iTunes store. I figured since the music was all DRM free, so would the videos. That is definitely not the case. Fortunately, a while back, I had torrented Requiem; however, the latest versions of iTunes render Requiem useless. Using an archival site, I found iTunes version 8.0, installed it on the Windows virtual machine I have on my laptop, and tried running Requiem. Nothing. Kept getting the error that the file could not be decrypted.Then I realized that I had forgotten to authorize that iTunes instance with my ITMS account. Once that was done, I was able to start decrypting the file. About five minutes (or less) later, my .MP4 was ready and worked fine on my eeePC running Linux, although mplayer didn’t have the h.264 codec while VLC worked just fine.
Now, what could an honest, law-abiding citizen such as myself possibly want with circumventing DRM? That’s stealing, isn’t it? Well the problem is that I only run Windows in a virtual machine. Sure, I buy music from ITMS, but that’s in a virtual machine where I then copy the (now) DRM-free music to my Linux music library, load it on to my iPod, and generally also transfer it to my OpenSolaris install on my laptop. Trying to play movies on the virtual machine is like trying to watch YouTube on dialup. Ain’t gonna happen. A decrypted file is necessary for me to actually watch the video files on anything other than a tiny iPod Classic screen.
August 31, 2009, 7:24pm
