There’s a lot of discussion about Digital Rights Managment or DRM in windows Vista.? I just came accross this article over at ZDNet that discusses whether or not it’s limiting? (drm).? So the author has been running Vista for over a week, and reports that he’s able to view and play both DRM’d and non-DRM’d content in both mp3 files and DVD’s.? He also talks about the the discussion of DRM being used for gaming and it slowing down video playback performance - but no games really seem to be doing this.? The only DRM they seem to use is for copy-proof CD’s and DVD’s.

The thing I find surprising is that he doesn’t mention anything about the apparent driver “lockdown” of the CD/DVD drive in Vista.? I too have been testing Windows Vista on a new laptop and I had a DVD of my own video footage.? I wanted to “rip” that to the hard drive for editing.? I installed 3 different programs (that I used to use to rip video in XP) and each one generated an error saying that it “didn’t have access to the drive” (my internal DVD burner drive).

So sure - I can play non-DRM’d content all I want, but only certain software programs (approved by Microsoft) are able to “access” the optical drives for ripping content.? Now - that’s DRM at the hardware and driver level isn’t it?