Mozilla's Songbird media player (0.2.5) will support Apple FairPlay and Windows Media DRM audio playback.
The features were already enabled in the nightly build and, "everyone is encouraged to give those builds a spin," says Ben on Ben's Blog, pointing out that if you're runningWindows, "you'll need to have a new-ish version of Windows Media Player (probably 9 or newer) for protected WMA playback and QuickTime for Windows (probably 7 or newer) for FairPlay to work. On OS X you'll only get FairPlay playback, sorry."
Do did this mean the encryption keys were hacked? Nothing so dastardly.
"Songbird supports multiple playback cores so we simply use Apple's and Microsoft's own playback engines to do the decoding for us," says Ben. "We use VLC for playback of most file types, but now whenever you play a protected WMA or M4P file we swap in the Windows Media Player or QuickTime core."
Easy?
"The world of DRM is a little (cough) unfriendly," says the post, adding, "Maybe I would feel less bitter if they'd simply stamped a big red 'WARNING' banner on their documentation."
Ben shares a few war stories and tricks for anyone interested in making DRM playback work in their own apps. Click here for chapter and verse.
Meanwhile, "Songbird is developed by a band of experienced, dedicated software developers and designers called the Pioneers of the Inevitable," says the group, going on:
Our previous hatchlings include Winamp and the Yahoo! Music Engine.
Our mission is to incubate Songbird, the first Web player, to catalyze and champion a diverse, open Media Web. To this end, our investors include one of the top Silicon Valley venture capital firms.
We don't steal music and you shouldn't either. We support DigitalConsumer.org's Bill of Rights as the best means to a burgeoning, diverse and lawful digital media market.
We give a thankful super-crazy double dag-nasty dirty-style squawk to the Mozilla Foundation, the VLC team, the SQLite dude and all the innovating free and open source software developers.
Also See: Ben's Blog - Running the DRM Gauntlet, February 4, 2007
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