HTML5 Media Source Extensions: Bringing Production Video to the Web | Hacker News Reader

HTML5 Media Source Extensions: Bringing Production Video to the Web

smashingmagazine.com

21 pointsslederer17 comments

Without detracting anything from MSE, EME doesn't bring "production video" to the web. It brings useless encryption that needs to die before it even sees the light.

Maybe you really need a reminder if you think that EME does anything useful: look at blueray or any encrypted video technology before it.

Now, your users already paid for it. They're logged-in and the transport is secured. If they want to copy the video, they'll do it anyway. So please, let's kill this draft.

You're not going to get Hollywood to publish online without EME.

This is the discussion about whether you want Hollywood movies to exist online or not, and they're perfectly happy to go without online streaming.

> You're not going to get Hollywood to publish online without EME.

Then they don't publish online. It's not the end of the world.

> This is the discussion about whether you want Hollywood movies to exist online or not, and they're perfectly happy to go without online streaming.

I'd say "perfectly happy" is an overstatement... given that they are the ones trying to push nonsense this though.

the EME is widely used by services like Netflix, Hulu, etc., and it's now the first time that DRM is not a pain for developers. So I think the EME helps to simplify a huge problem (=DRM), and make it manageable for the people to use it.

DRM is a huge problem. A huge problem for legitimate users who purchased their media from legitimate sources. It's a huge problem for content creators as it pushes consumers who would otherwise have purchased media to pirating it because pirating is the easier path. The only people DRM doesn't hurt is pirates.

don't know if we talk about the same. DRM (Digital Right Management) is just the overall term, there are different systems out there (Widevine Modular, Playready, Fairplay, Primetime, etc.), which are used e.g. by Netflix. So, why do you think DRM is a problem for legitimate users?

The rest of the web is open and patchable (user scripts, curl, ...) and thus lets you customize things.

Can you pipe a netflix stream to mplayer?

No, mplayer doesn't support the needed DRM systems afaik.

They aren't needed. They're wanted, by companies like NetFlix. DRM does not enable anything for the user. It specifically disables being able to use your computer to consume media that you paid for in convenient ways.

And what if my users rent it?

I tried to give an overview on the technical details of the HTML5 MSE/EME, which is used e.g. by Netflix and Youtube. If you are interested in any details, just post it here, happy to answer.

So, does every website need to build their own Javascript MSE player?

Why isn't this built into the browser?

there are of the shelf players supporting the EME (see above), thus you can just use one of them. It makes actually sense to seperate the player from the decoding (MSE), as the browser manufacturers might not be able to provide a good implementation of streaming formats. We saw this already with poor implementations of streaming formats/players on TV-sets, so it's good to have specialized and good working player vendors/projects.

What 3rd party players do you recommend for HTML5 MSE/EME based playback across popular browsers?

on the open source side, shaka (https://github.com/google/shaka-player), dash.js (https://github.com/Dash-Industry-Forum/dash.js/wiki) and hls.js (http://dailymotion.github.io/hls.js/demo/) are good.

on the commercial prodcut side, the bitmovin player https://bitmovin.com/player/ is best one covering HLS & DASH on all browsers. There are also a lot of demos at http://www.dash-player.com/demo/

Are binary black-box EMEs going to be the new flash&java-applet of web vulnerabilities?

hopefully not :-)

the difference between Flash-like plugins and the EME is that the EME is directly build into the browser, with a narrow and focussed use case. This limits als the vulnerability, in contrast to a lot more powerful plugin-systems like Flash or Silverlight or Java.

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