Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 27th Aug 2007 22:21 UTC
A curious network performance reduction noticed by many Windows Vista users of the 2CPU forum that became the talk of Slashdot last week has been identified as having been caused not by DRM, as Slashdot users expected, but by a curious prioritization 'feature' of Vista that's intentionally biased toward Media Player at the expense of network and system resources.
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Member since:2006-07-04
"MS were worried that all their DRM related encryption/decryption of multimedia streams would take up too much CPU and people would notice dodgy playback.
So MS just upped the process priority until these side-effects disappeared."
If that's the case, then why are only Gigabit networks affected? Why does playing non-DRM multimedia manifest the problem even though such multimedia undergoes no encryption/decryption? Why is it that DRM'ed media on XP has no problems with "taking up too much CPU"?
There's no evidence that this screwup is due to DRM, but believe whatever you want.
Edited 2007-08-28 10:59
RE[3]: Article in short
by stestagg on Tue 28th Aug 2007 11:11
in reply to "RE[2]: Article in short"
Member since:2006-06-03
HDCP and HDMI Video/Audio in Vista is encrypted.
The CPU has to do lots of extra work to encrypt/manage the data that is sent down internal busses. This was not a feature of XP.
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html#cpu
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Member since:
2006-06-03
Between the lines. MS were worried that all their DRM related encryption/decryption of multimedia streams would take up too much CPU and people would notice dodgy playback.
So MS just upped the process priority until these side-effects disappeared.