you know when you open a file (likely to be a downloaded torrent movie or something similar) you sometimes find yourself needing a security upgrade or a license needs to be aquired. just wondering, any of you guys know how it works? or better yet, anyone out there know a good app to crack the licenses some of the windows media files have. help in this matter would be much appreciated...

never happened for me on movies....except for porn , not sure how they work but i stay clear of them if they are small wmv's or if they are .asx, too many virus'

there are several things that are a factor here.

...
First off all mediaplayer will (if you let it) try to collect data on the movie you downloaded, to show you extra info, as the title, author, .. if that is missing. (This would enable "them" to keep statistics and track you down, but they say they don't ... )

Then there is the evil DRM issue. DRM stands for digital rights management. Basicly you would download encrypted mumbojumbo, and everytime you want to play it you need to get a key. this is evil in so many ways, that you must object. First of all they control how mutch you play it, what you play it on, ... not good ( it's like buying a book, and everytime you want to read it, you need to phone to the publisher to enable the book, and he would only do it if you are drinking a beverage from his sponser coca cola)


However if you illegally download a move from a non governement site(there are governement torrent seeders btw), and work from a reputable scene group. There will not be any drm on it. Partly because it requires infrastructure (to provide keys for the movies) that just wouldn't make sence for a scene group.

Then finally windows mediaplayer is from m$ closed source, buggy, you don't know what it's doing just don't use it.

use the opensource mplayer http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/dload.html

cheers