Cibbuano1 TB MyBook Storage System has DRM
December 11th 2007 18:08
It's called the My Book World Edition from Western Digital, and it's quite a savvy consumer product, allowing you to stream media at home, wirelessly, or somewhere else in the world, through a wired connection.
How much is 1 TB? Well, simply put it's 1 000 000 000 000 bytes.
How much is that, really? Well, from the Western Digital site, that's:
" Up to 285,000 digital photos
Up to 250,000 songs (MP3)
Up to 25,000 songs (uncompressed CD quality)
Up to 76 hours of Digital Video (DV)
Up to 400 hours of DVD quality video
Up to 100 hours of HD video"
Fantastic!
The bad news, though, is that Wired Gadget Lab blog found that there's DRM blocking unauthorized files from being transferred.
Basically, the My Book won't let you share MP3, DivX, AVI, WMV and Quicktime files, which pretty much makes it a pain in the ass. Unless you were clever enough to move all your media to open-source formats.
Bah! Here's the full list of filetypes that are not allowed.
I could rant on and on about how useless this device is, a perfect example of how DRM cripples a useful consumer product. We'll just make them ourselves, thanks.
It turns out that the DRM is only active if you install the Western Digital client software, which sounds like a losing battle. Instead, load your own client software - do it - there's a whole community out there to help you.
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