Microsoft's WMV DRM (Digital Restrictions Management)

Preamble: Copyrighted content should be respected, and the creater should be paid recognised for his or her work. However, if there's any doubt as to the morality of DRM, please read "The Customer Is Always Wrong" by the EFF. It's not illegal to circumvent or remove DRM, in the same way that you can disable cd protections to make a personal backup; this is "Fair Use", depending on which country you're in.

Digital Music: I buy all my music legally from Emusic and AllofMP3 because it's fairly priced; most people prefer good quality, cheap content to variable quality, free content. Digital music providers who use DRM (eg. iTunes) are rapidly loosing market share to these non-DRM providers (see Xtn Data's report on this).

Digital Video: There's no equivalent movie download service; all the ones I've seen so far provide DRM content using Microsoft's apalling unportable WMV format. So have to pay multiple times to own (not to rent or to purchase limited rights) for the same content which I watch on a wide variety of devices using a wide variety of software.

Case Study: BT Vision. Let's look at the value proposition for an example movie (Jarhead):

	Amazon.co.uk	BT Vision
Price	GBP 8 (EUR 12)	GBP 17 (EUR 25)
Quality	9.8 Mbit/s MPEG-2 video	1.6 Mbit/s WMV video
Restrictions	None	Can only play using Windows Media Player 10+ Can only play if connected to the Internet
Compatability / Portability	Compatable with anything; Portable to anything	Plays on a limited selection of platforms; Cannot convert

So, for more than twice the price, you get a lower quality, restricted version? Add to that this "service" is available only in the UK, and you have to download and install BT's "Vision Player" - who would want that? With no fair alternative, no wonder people are just downloading the DVD for free.

Un-DRM: I'm not suggesting anyone should purchase from BT Vision (continue to download for free via Bittorrent, and buy the physical DVD if you can find it in a store) but if you must, then here's how to disable the DRM.

1. Start off with the DRM-enabled file, in this case the Jarhead demo dowloaded as a sample file from BT Vision. If you right click it, click on properties and on the License tab, you'll see "protected content".
   [4.6 MB]
2. You need Windows Media Player 10.00.00.3646 (not the latest version). You can download it here. [12 MB]
3. You need to install Windows Script Host to get the un-DRM software to work. You can download it here [660 kb]
4. You need to install "Automate unDRM" software which you can download here. [340 kb]
   For some reason, the install requires a password: it's "mayang".
5. Once installed, right-click on the DRM-enabled file, click 'send to' and the click "Automate unDRM".
6. You'll be left with a file with no DRM!
   [4.6 MB]
7. That's it! You can convert to a reasonable, portable format using your favourite converter.