[MPlayer-users] .wma audio fails to play - an example

[Raphael Clifford]

Dominik Mierzejewski wrote:

>[Automatic answer: RTFM (read DOCS, FAQ), also read DOCS/bugreports.html]
>On Friday, 25 July 2003, Raphael Clifford wrote:
>  
>
>>Here is the example audio file that does not appear to be playable under 
>>linux.  You have to unzip it to even get to the .wma file even though 
>>under windows there is no need to as Media Player seems to understand 
>>.wmd files.
>>
>>http://www.jesus.ox.ac.uk/~rcliffor/Average_Boy.wmd
>>
>>If we could find some way to play these files that would a fantastic 
>>step forward. At the moment it seems that you can't play a lot of music 
>>you have bought and downloaded online!
>>    
>>
>
>It's a zipfile containing another zipfile (with some graphics), an asx
>playlist and wma audio, which doesn't play a sound. :(
>
>  
>
Yep. The .wma is protected in some way. If you play it in Windows it 
first "individualises" your media player by going to Microsoft over the 
net and then asks for some personal details before doing something else 
over the net that I don't really understand. You can then play it.  I 
can't find any details on the web of what exactly is going on.  Does 
anybody have any?  Somebody must have a spec for .wmd files??

In the meantime I have the following basic questions:

Is the .wma actually encrypted requiring a key that is not in any of the 
files in the .wmd archive?  In other words, is it both theoretically and 
practically impossible to play it without getting the key over the net 
the way media player does?

Given that you have bought and paid for the track can we capture the 
traffic that media player takes part in to get that key?

What is the encryption algorithm?

Cheers,
Raphael