Comment by BurningCycles | Hacker News Reader

Comment by BurningCycles | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Yeah, I cringed when reading this. The whole 'good guys' routine with Cisco, Google, Mozilla stepping up to fight the evil 'malcorp' for justice was pretty embarrassing.

I'm all for a 'de facto' standardisation around a royalty free codec, which is what we get with AV1, but lets not pretend that these companies are doing this for any altruistic reasons.

Everything is moving to streaming, and video usage will only keep growing, so for these huge companies, having what is increasingly a core part of their business in the financial hands of third parties is an extremely unattractive position.

Google was already dead set on leaving this dependency, and now when they started work on their third generation codec (VP10) many other companies started to get the message, prompted in a large part no doubt by the HEVC patent fiasco, which now has resulted in AV1.

>AV1 has a really slow encoder, so until that has changed

Well, optimization has likely only recently started in earnest, given that the bitstream was frozen this summer. Personally I'm more interested in the RAV1e AV1 encoder in the works from Xiph than I am in the 'official' one.

> The whole 'good guys' routine with Cisco, Google, Mozilla stepping up to fight the evil 'malcorp' for justice was pretty embarrassing.

Yep.

If anyone wants to know what Google and Mozilla would do in the face of corporations closing off the Internet, you can look at what they _actually did_ with Encrypted Media Extensions.

EME was made to discourage the creation of proprietary systems for adding DRM, not to appease corporations.

DRM is fundamentally proprietary. Just because the container around it is defined in a standard does not in any way discourage the creation of proprietary systems -- it by definition facilitates them (and therefore appeases corporations that produce DRM content).

The whole "DRM will happen one way or another, EME is better" is only an acceptable argument if you don't have an issue with DRM (because then you can argue that EME is "nicer" than non-EME because EME is a "standard form" of DRM).

Making it frustrating for people to access DRM content results in a distrust of DRM vendors and a general dislike of DRM -- which is (in my view) a positive outcome. Facilitating DRM in a way that makes it much easier for people to view it is not a neutral position in a world where "DRM is inevitable".

so DRM is OK as long as it's enclosed within a standardised protocol?

EME is the better option if you believe DRM is going to happen one way or the other: it can be contained and ideally used cross-platform, not just on blessed end-devices.

EME is bad if you believe DRM would die/be less common if no standard existed.

>ideally used cross-platform, not just on blessed end-devices.

Tough luck with that though since EME only specifies how to communicate with DRM, and the actual DRM consists of multiple 100% proprietary black boxes that only work on blessed end devices and browsers. And since different browsers have different black boxes, you need to play ball with Apple, Google, Microsoft, and every other unique DRM vendor.

EME is a disgrace that should have never come to pass. Premium media should rather be forced to peddle their own clients entirely separate from browsers if they insist on non-cross-platform black box bullshit.

I'm not against content protection in itself, but EME was 100% marketed on false pretenses because it's just as much of a proprietary plugin system than what came before, with just as terrible cross-platform story too. If instead we had content protection schemes implemented in eg. WebAssembly, then we could actually talk about a cross-platform system that also doesn't immediately close out smaller browser vendors from the market.

> EME is the better option if you believe DRM is going to happen one way or the other

Waterboarding is the better option if you believe that torture is going to happen one way or the other.

That analogy doesn't work because the people doing the waterboarding have the power to choose not to use torture in the first place. Whereas the W3C can't choose for content producers to not use DRM--they will do it regardless.

> That analogy doesn't work because the people doing the waterboarding have the power to choose not to use torture in the first place.

The Hollywood studios also have the power not to enforce having to use DRM on their licensees.

Right, but nobody is defending them.

from an economic perspective, I'd rather DRM be as expensive to utilise as possible. A world where media conglomerates have to spend money keeping their DRM up-to-date on every new end-user device is one where they may be more likely to think about the cost/benefit of alternative options.

They will only keep it up-to-date on those with enough market share. No Linux. Maybe Mac. For the slightly smaller players, on mobile, maybe only Iphone, or Iphone + Flagship Android.

which when added up provides a viable market segment for a company that does not insist on DRM. Especially as the mobile device market continues to fragment.

Mozilla decided that providing this feature serves their users better than not providing it. Especially that users can turn it off. ( https://mat.tl/disable-eme-in-chrome-and-firefox.html )

Firefox was forced by Chrome, and Chrome in turn was probably forced by trying to remain a viable platform instead of Netflix et al. simply providing their own desktop apps. (Though I'm only guessing, if you have direct knowledge of the what and why, please do share.)

> Firefox was forced by Chrome, and Chrome in turn was probably forced by trying to remain a viable platform instead of Netflix et al. simply providing their own desktop apps.

The kind of users who are not opposed against DRM already have lots of browsers to choose between. On the other hand, people who are will now feel deeply betrayed by the Mozilla Foundation.

And then there are people like me, who are opposed to DRM, yet don't feel betrayed.

If you're opposed to a browser that can be used by DRM modules, Firefox was already not an option, since it supported NPAPI, and therefore DRM as Flash, Silverlight, etc. If you were using Firefox, you were already accepting that compromise. EME is simply a continuation of the status quo.

> will now feel deeply betrayed by the Mozilla Foundation.

Was there an explicit or implicit covenant by Mozilla and those users?

> Was there an explicit or implicit covenant by Mozilla and those users?

I believe Mozilla's clear stance on DRM in the past (and its clear differentiation against other browser vendors in this respect) is near to such an implicit covenant.

Why would the producers of the content choose to license it to DRM-free delivery services though? Unless you are suggesting that Desktop Linux users are a viable market segment for triple-A content producers themselves, which I doubt.

I don't know the answer to that, but it's a market that startups could potentially capitalise on. It would also not just be desktop linux users, but anyone not using the top N web clients (where N is chosen by said media provider to provide the best cost/benefit to maintaining the DRM on those platforms).

Meh. They can do what they want, but that was the end of my donations to Firefox.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com