Today is the Day Against DRM, working against Digital Restrictions Management or Technological Protection Measures (TPM). I’ve two tips to help with our public disservice British Broadcasting Corporation which has consistently failed to act in the public interest and reject DRM:
- If you want to link to a BBC radio show like Global Business, you can often get mp3 and avoid Flash-forcing DRM-wannabe iPlayer (and cool toys like get_iplayer) by using BBC Mobile’s Podcasts Index.
- Satellite TV broadcasts can be captured as MP2 by MythTV or even 50-quid black box home entertainment devices. The DRM-free file can be played back on a computer with
mplayer -demuxer +mpegts filename.dvror re-encoded for other devices withmencoder.
What DRM-avoiding tips would you give?
If you are ‘rocking with the man’, aka buying music via download, prefer Amazon to itunes as they are DRM free on Amazon. (And they offer their downloader for 64 bit Debian, not too bad…)
If you have to buy from itunes, if you download AAC, then use itunes to immediately burn an audio CD, and then re-rip to a high bitrate MP3, (Artifacts from two encodings – yuck, oh well, you used itunes.) It will tag the MP3s and everything if you do it this way so you have effective un-DRMed the download.
Use a torrent client and thepiratebay.org.