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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • Microsoft’s solution above is tacked-on and inelegant, it’s a bandaid to fix a problem with WMDRM that MTP devices were causing in the first place. MTP wasn’t built for enforcing DRM and and Amazon would just be setting themselves up to face the same issues if that was their goal here. Also, unlike Microsoft, they don’t have the advantage of being the original creators of MTP. If they did want a completely DRM controlled environment, turning the Kindle PC app into something more like iTunes where it’s the only program able to communicate with Kindles would have been a much better first step than implementing an industry standard file transfer protocol. They could have jumped straight to your second step like that.

    My best guess as to why they’re making the switch to MTP is because USB Mass Storage currently requires them to maintain a separate partition with a fixed size formatted in NTFS FAT32 on a Linux-based device just so it can occasionally be exposed to a PC it’s plugged into, and that’s… kinda stupid. MTP provides them the option to just not do all that. MTP is the standard mobile devices use these days, it’s going to be easier and cheaper for them to develop around and they won’t need two different file systems and partitions on one device anymore.


  • The Kindle doesn’t use Windows Media DRM for its DRM protected ebooks, they use Amazon’s own DRM. Even if they did use WMDRM though, this is just an extension for MTP that would enable it to be used for streaming WMDRM content. It “provides a mapping of WMDRM: Network Devices Protocol messages to the Media Transfer Protocol (MTP)” and that’s necessary because MTP would otherwise not provide the data necessary for for the DRM protected content to play.

    There’s still nothing here that would prevent you from copying your own “legitimately obtained” epub files or Amazon-encrypted AZW files to or from your PC.

    I see this article is the first result when searching “MTP DRM” on Google though 😉




  • They’re the same codebase, but they all need to be bought separately from each other. Like, there will probably come a day when Minecraft Bedrock on Nintendo Switch stops receiving updates, but the PS5 version continues on.

    For there to be a VR version for them to just stop updating like that, a VR-specific version would need to exist in the first place. They can’t just abandon VR as-is but still have it available to be played like they did with Minecraft on the 3DS because there isn’t a VR version they can abandon.

    They abandoned the Gear VR verison, but that was a separate installation from regular Minecraft Bedrock and they could just stop updating that version of the app.





  • No it’s not like that. Unlike Minecraft Bedrock on PC, XBOX, PS, Switch, iOS, or Android, there’s no VR specific Minecraft version that can be installed. If you have Minecraft on PS4 or PC, VR support is already built in.

    For example, Skyrim and Skyrim VR are separate games, but Minecraft isn’t. They can’t just leave the VR version alone because there is no VR-only version and the only thing that determines whether you’re playing in 2D or VR is a flag that’s set on launch.

    Edit: Again, discounting the Gear VR version here because they dropped support for it long before Better Together happened and it can only be played on the Gear VR which was basically Google Cardboard.