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Comment by guyzero | Hacker News Reader

Chromecast and AirPlay are both locked down because they're fundamentally tied to DRM and no content provider is going to spend any time on a platform that doesn't have strong L1 DRM.

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As vlc proved before, you can be open and play drm protected content.

Some countries make it illegal, but France doesn't so I'd be happy to have such device.

The VLC docs say "VLC, like all open source media players, cannot play [DRM] protected files", so I always assumed it wasn't possible without stripping the DRM yourself. Does it work now?

[1] https://wiki.videolan.org/Digital_Restrictions_Management/

It does strip the DRM on DVDs out of the box, and there are ways to add support for AACS decryption (Blu-Ray).

And content providers do not directly support vlc. As log as you reverse engineer stuff, you can support DRM on anything (at least in most countries), but do not expect it to be a successful platform.

We really need reasonable copyright laws.

And it works the other way too: as a consumer I don't care about whether something is open or not, if it doesn't stream the things I want to stream.

Consider caring.

I do care. I just care less about openness than convenience notice the "IF it doesn't stream...". Given two systems that work equally well, I'd pick the open one. That's rarely the case though. So I pick the polished one. I think this goes for most consumers.

It affects consumers, though. Closed platforms work against consumers' interest way too often.

You start caring when 'your' devices are suborned into a proxy fight against their actual owner's competitors.

No. I care about both convenience and openness. At some point perhaps the proxy fight makes the producs inconvenient? Perhaps even less convenient than the open alternative? At that point consumers might reconsider. Not until then.

On the other hand the non-streaming downloaded movies/music/games etc. will stop working when the company loses interest in providing the DRM servers. See Microsoft's PlaysForSure, ultraviolet, ....

Or they "work" but only in low resolution because your HDCP version is not good enough. If the pirated version is objectively better, then something is wrong with your product.

Consumers in general have no idea whether their offline media is dependent on DRM services so it’s an inconvenience they’ll only know when it’s too late. I agree it’s bad but I also think it’s a problem that disappeared when people stopped handling offline media.

My convenience choice (and most I assume these days) is to completely skip offline/non-streamed media apart from what I create myself.

In contrast with online media you can be certain that it depends on DRM services. So it is less that it disappeared and more that it is now extremely widespread.

Sure, it is convenient until your software/hardware is no longer supported (same HDCP problems, codecs, DRM schemes), 4k is only available on... , the monthly rent increases, it is now bundled with Amazon Prime Plus Ultra, the company pulls an Adobe in Venezuela, the company gets bought by Comcast, the company goes bankrupt, ... .

For movies you unfortunately don't have much choice, but for games, ebooks and music you can find DRM free stores.

It's the same storey with all products. Of course I'd prefer just buying DRM free games, avoiding single player games that require connecting to services that can be down (looking at you Origin) etc. But the price and the product itself (the game, move, tv-series or whatever) is the deciding factor. There is never going to be enough people choosing services based on technical reaosns and not only content+price.

> There is never going to be enough people choosing services based on technical reaosns and not only content+price.

That sounds needlessly pessimistic. You could have said the same thing about music downloads several years ago, yet here we are (though music streaming admittedly goes in the other direction). People tend to choose based on convenience and music that I can easily take from my pc to put on my phone or wherever is more convenient than DRM stuff.

Convenience is surely why Spotify won over even the free mp3 downloads? Anything that involves user-managed files in any sense will never be convenient to the masses. It’s a concept more dead than vhs. You won’t find many that find moving and organizing files “convenient”.

Honest question, can it not be both? Can it not have an open side and a closed side for DRM content? Similar to browsers for example.

L1 DRM requires a secured channel all the way from the app layer to the hardware. No DRM vendor is going to offer their solution on something like Linux. You can't even watch Netflix in 4K in a browser - it's only available on secured dedicated video playback devices or directly in TVs.

You can watch 4K Netflix in Edge, which I would call browser. But the point still stands, only works with supported hardware and proprietary software.

https://help.netflix.com/en/node/13444

I did not know that! I thought it was only in the app. I stand corrected.

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