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Comment by acdha | Hacker News Reader

EME is a huge advantage from a security perspective because it avoids pulling in a massive platform (Flash, Silverlight) just to play video. We can debate other aspects but from a security perspective moving to a small, tightly-scoped module is a big win and that's important when the cost of vulnerabilities is in the billions per year.

It's also somewhat good for the web since both of those platforms are competitors and companies often reuse things they've already invested in.

It is unequivocally bad that it poses a risk to Mozilla but the real problem isn't EME but rather the fact that all of the DRM opposition since the 90s has failed to move public opinion much. As long as customers happily pay for DRMed content and three of the major browsers are made by DRM vendors, the most likely alternative to Flash is a proprietary interface. The fact that EME is standardized at least gives the EFF better grounds for demanding consistent treatment.

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You don't need EME to play video, HTML5 video can be played just fine without it.

AFAIK, You need EME to make sure that only browsers that have the Foo-Corporation EME plugin can play Foo-Corporation videos.

And to get the EME plugin for a browser, you need to ask permissions from Foo-Corporation to have it. So anyone writing a new browers (like Mozilla did with what became Firefox) will have to ask for this permission and will likely not just get it.

Seems like another example of where big companies got to where they are because the space they moved into was wide and open and free. But now that they have claimed that space and divided it up amongst a few players, they'll do their damned best to fence it of, wall it in and make sure none else can ever move into ever again.

> You don't need EME to play video, HTML5 video can be played just fine without it.

I'm quite aware of that but consider it from the perspective of a normal user using a non-Apple/Google/Microsoft browser:

1. Click on a link on YouTube, Hulu, etc. It's not DRMed, so it just works.

2. The next thing in the playlist is DRMed (e.g. it's premium, owned by a more restrictive publisher, etc.) and it doesn't play.

For people like us, step 3 might be “Decide you didn't want to play it that much” or “Complain to the provider”.

For the vast majority of users, step 3 is more like “Give up on Firefox and use Chrome/Edge/Safari”. How many of them will eventually stop using Firefox in the first place?

That's the real problem here – even if Firefox had 90% marketshare, it would evaporate quickly because switching is easy, users have a bunch of reasonable quality options, and most users don't feel that they're getting a bad deal.

EDIT: note that I'm not saying this is how I'd like it to work, only that anyone who thinks DRM is unjust needs to think about the millions of Netflix subscribers and both why and how those people should spend their $9/month elsewhere.

> EME is a huge advantage from a security perspective because it avoids pulling in a massive platform (Flash, Silverlight) just to play video.

You don't need EME "just to play video". HTML5-video without EME can do that just fine.

It is only when you conflate video playback with DRM then that argument somewhat works.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11738527

But the vast majority of video watched today (think Netflix) would not be on the web if it were not DRMed.

Philosophical arguments about what "video" "needs" are all very well, but the side that actually provides users with the content they want where they want it will be the side that wins, and very quickly.

Leaving aside the ethical stuff what worries me most about EME is that it'll break my linux usage at as a desktop, with a few exceptions I currently have a web experience equal to (or better) than anything on Windows or MacOSX, binary blobs that may never make it to Linux are a concern.

Agreed — I don't see much chance for change in the general DRM debate but it would be nice if it at least hit the point of something like H.264 where there were standard terms available to anyone who wanted to implement it so a new player couldn't be frozen out.

(Back in the day, we had a client who was working on a BeOS appliance. Plugins were a big deal since things like Flash were theoretically portable but Adobe wasn't going to talk with you for less than a certain dollar amount)

The only problem I have with supporting EME is that it closes the market for new browsers to enter because they need to get certification. What incentive do the current market players have for allowing new browsers access to EME?

> all of the DRM opposition since the 90s has failed to move public opinion much

In the music space, opposition to DRM was very successful.

The same could have been true for video, we'll never know, because Google, Microsoft, and Netflix created EME.

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