Hacker News Reader

Comment by codejoust | Hacker News Reader

I just looked at the code - I'm pretty sure grooveshark is calling a flash object through javascript to play the music.

Its probably something similar to SoundManager2, which you can learn more about here: http://www.schillmania.com/projects/soundmanager2/

I've used it in a project of mine which allows you to upload and control your music library like iTunes using an html/js interface.

It's an in-house player. I'm the author. We have a fairly complicated streaming setup, so it's written specifically to work with our internal API.

Can you replace it with HTML/JS too and remove all dependency on Flash?

I'm not an iPad owner, but I'm thinking it wouldn't hurt if iPad owners would use your site from the iPad, too.

Perhaps eventually. It's something we've looked into, but we have some content security concerns. Obviously it's not impossible to rip our content with flash streaming, but it is more difficult than something that can be written with an <audio> tag.

Someone could easily steal my car's stereo even if I lock the doors, by using a slim jim/lockpick (downloader tool) or smashing my window (rip audio straight from the sound card). There's no way to 100% stop determined people from stealing my stereo, just like there's no 100% way to stop determined people from ripping our content. But that doesn't mean I leave my car unlocked.

Also right now we use the flash piece as a proxy for making service calls that would be otherwise significantly more difficult/impossible through javascript's crossdomain restrictions.

Could you at least make the flash object visible somewhere so that we could un-Flashblock it? (Anyway we can always whitelist in each computer we use it, but it would be nice)

Are there any plans to move the code in the Flash piece to a Java piece? :)

I believe they send encrypted audio through the flash player? That might be the reason they have kept it through all revisions.

I would assume that this is the reason.

This is one of the major limitations of the HTML5 + Javascript stack, and one that will have to be solved before we see even more widespread use on services like Hulu or Netflix.

Wireshark doesn't say it's encrypted.

It might not say it is encrypted, but I doubt the publishers/who ever they have deals with to stay legal would allow them to transfer copyrighted materials in the clear.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com