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Comment by mindstab | Hacker News Reader

And so in a small part the MSIE team is back to "creating" new "standards" for the web because they were the first on board so the get more input to the final product. I hate to say it (in part because I'm not 100% sold on web DRM, tho netflix on Linux will be nice...) but by being sticks in the mud over the issue Google and Mozilla are now going to be following IE's lead for probably the first time in a while

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Also, standardizing EME will not bring Netflix to Linux (the most common misunderstanding around EME). Please name one CDM for a Linux distro other than ChromeOS. Widevine is available only in ChromeOS, and Playready is only available in Windows. So looks like you have to buy one of those Operating Systems to have Netflix.

These proposed changes to the standard do not add DRM. Rather they add a standardized interface between javascript in a browser and a proprietary binary blob that actually contains the DRM. Why do you think this would improve the situation of Netflix on Linux?

All you are going to have is a fancy API with nothing to plug into it.

Google implemented DRM in Chrome before IE did.

The key specs for all this to work are:

* Web Cryptography API[1], edited by Mozilla and Google

* Media Source Extensions[2], edited by Google, Microsoft and Netflix

* Encrypted Media Extensions[3], edited by Google, Microsoft and Netflix

These are not pseudo standards pushed only by Microsoft. ChromeOS already supports two of these specs.

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/WebCryptoAPI/

[2] http://www.w3.org/TR/media-source/

[3] http://www.w3.org/TR/encrypted-media/

> tho netflix on Linux will be nice...

What's annoying is that you can run netflix on linux right now[1] via `netflix-desktop`, which combines `firefox`, `silverlight` and a modified copy of `wine` to access their site.

If they switch over to these new plugins and the plugins are IE-specific, we'll be locked out again.

[1] * https://launchpad.net/netflix-desktop * http://www.compholio.com/netflix-desktop/

Over my dead body.

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