Via CoolTool.Com comes this story illustrating the utter stupidity of digital rights management schemes that some companies are starting to build into MP3 players.
In this case ZDNet’s Josh Taylor reviewed Toshiba’s MobilPhile MP3 player. The MobilPhile is Toshiba’s answer to the iPod and features a 5 gig. hard drive and a USB 2.0 connection which can theoretically pump MP3s onto the player at up to 480mbs per second.
But Toshiba decided to cripple the MobilPhile with DRM management. Rather than just copying MP3s from your home machine or laptop to the MobilPhile, first you have to run the MP3s through a program that encrypts them and makes it impossible to transfer the MP3s back to a different machine.
And in Taylor’s test, completely eliminated the advantage of using USB 2.0 rather than USB 1.1. Taylor copied an album to the MobilPhile using USB 1.1 — it took 53 seconds. Switching to USB 2.0 still took 48 seconds for the same operation. Wow, a 40-fold theoretical advantage in throughput yields an astounding 5 second advantage in performance.
You can drag and drop files to the MobilPhile, but the catch is you can’t listen to MP3 files on the device if they are moved in this straightforward way. But dragging and dropping the album took under 5 seconds over a USB 2.0 connection.
Thanks Toshiba!