I'm thinking about using an old desktop as a media center. It only has a 995 megahertz AMD processor from 2004 and 512 megabytes of RAM. I'll install Lubuntu 10.04 because it only requires 256 megabytes of RAM. However, some of the media I'd like to play is media I bought on iTunes. I know that I might be able to get iTunes running with Wine, but I'm afraid that the virtualization will be too demanding for the desktop's processor and that it'll require too much RAM, which is why I'd like to avoid using iTunes if I can.

I've done some research and found out that VLC can't play iTunes without some sort of key which has to be generated on a Windows PC.

Is there a media player for Linux which can play media which has iTunes DRM? Particularly one which won't use much RAM?

I see Mixxx 2.1 alpha has a choice to play itunes now. but then again they also build that for windows and mac. I do not own any itunes so I have no way of testing it.

DRM

you bought it on Itoons
play it on Itoons

this IS WHAT!! "Digital RESTRICTIONS Management" is FOR
preventing you from USING what YOU WANT



some times Mplayer can just ignore the drm
unless it has to "call home"

I checked out Mixxx, and I found out that it's for mixing music. Does it only play iTunes music or does it somehow play iTunes videos?

You need to load those files back into iTunes either through a VM or an actual install and burn them onto a CD unprotected to release the DRM if it's possible with iTunes. I have a similar situation where I have tons of WMA files that are protected and I have to do the same thing. Pain in the A$$ because it's over a thousand songs.

DRM is why I have never owned anything from Apple - not hardware, software, music, not anything, and never will. You're locked into their tight ecosystem and cannot easily escape. If you were foolish enough to buy from iTunes, you're going to have to get out the hard way and burn all that music to CDs, then rerip it to your format of choice, either .mp3, .wav, .ogg, or whatever. Lots of people have tried to do it more directly and easily, and nobody has ever reported success, to my knowledge. This seems to be one of the main reasons CD-R is still in existence and being sold. It's way obsolete for anything else, but there is a huge base of music in iTune format waiting to be converted.

Uhm, what kind of "media" are we talking about here?

iTunes' music is DRM-free. Any Linux music player can play music bought from iTunes. If you bought your music files years and years ago when iTunes was still using DRM, then download them again (with iTunes) and copy them to your Linux box. I don't know why the posters who assumed you were talking about music decided to spread FUD and misinformation.

I have a small collection of iTunes-bought music files, and I just play them as I would any other music file.

But if you're talking about videos (or books), then you're out of luck. They are DRM-protected, and everything written by the posters above applies to them.

WMA...

My memory is a little foggy back in my Windows XP days but I do remember installing Windows Media Player 11 and I guess that's when everything went down hill.

Thanks for that article.

I know I started this thread at least a year ago, but I noticed that many of the posts here refer to music. I just want to mention that iTunes started selling movies and TV shows back in 2007 and they stopped selling music with DRM back in 2009. I got into iTunes in 2008, so I haven't really had to deal with DRM'ed music. I didn't know about the DRM back then. By the time I found out about the DRM, I didn't care because I thought I'd always stay in the Apple ecosystem at that point in time. But now I'm getting into Linux because I don't like Apple's latest hardware.