Brendan Eich on EME | Hacker News Reader

Brendan Eich on EME

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70 pointspaulrouget20 comments

Just a reminder (sorry I still can't say more; stuff in flight, risk as always) that we are still working on what I think everyone on the side of the open web should view as the better way out:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6496128

/be

Interesting take on things. In particular, this makes my blood run cold:

The playback "device" maker category includes vendors of plugins available cross-browser via NPAPI, of course really just Flash and Silverlight these days. It looks likely to include OS/browser vendors who purvey non-standardized CDMs available under cover of EME only to certain select OS/browser combinations -- possibly only each its own OS and browser!

> Also, DRM as proposed via EME is really all about Hollywood movies. It is not about copyrighted materials in general, nor should or can it be (see Hixie's post, or just see the Web).

I propose renaming EME to "the Hollywood API."

Why does anybody expect that only Hollywood movies would be DRM protected?

Wouldn't DRM be also "about Youtube" and any other web video streaming site (including Facebook?) as soon as it standardized -- practically preventing you to do anything you can do now except watching?

(Now you can actually capture the videos and play them offline).

If you believe DRM wouldn't be used, please present your arguments why it wouldn't.

Almost no one uses the DRM that's already available in Flash[1] and Silverlight today so it's not obvious that EME would lead to increased use of DRM. In practice, using EME is going to be expensive because you'll need N key servers (one for PlayReady, one for Widevide, one for OMA, one for FairPlay, etc.) and each one costs over $10,000 AFAIK and requires a bunch of integration code.

[1] I'm talking about Flash Access not RTMPE because AFAIK RTMPE doesn't meet Hollywood's robustness requirements.

Hollywood is pushing DRM and requiring its use. Netflix wants DRM (via Hollywood), but Youtube doesn't currently seem to mind being DRM free.

If DRM capability becomes ubiquitous, Youtube might become DRMed, but that's on a longer time horizon.

I agree with the post directly after his.

I think, of Flash/Silverlight and EME, the former is the lesser of two evils.

EME is requiring that we close off parts of the HTML5 spec to licensing restrictions to where they won't be subject to public access.

As far as I'm concerned, i'd be more contempt with Flash or Silverlight over not having full access to the HTML5 spec.

Where do you see this?

Isn't that post saying that EME is the lesser of two evils, because moving most of the video playback to the browser (minus only the DRM aspect) is a win?

I'm really struggling to understand how EME could be worse than the current plugin ecosystem in place.

Someone here cited my words from the post on this point:

``The playback "device" maker category includes vendors of plugins available cross-browser via NPAPI, of course really just Flash and Silverlight these days. It looks likely to include OS/browser vendors who purvey non-standardized CDMs available under cover of EME only to certain select OS/browser combinations -- possibly only each its own OS and browser!''

There are other issues, but this alone makes EME worse than NPAPI, a cross-browser standard. EME does not specify the API to the CDM (the new plugin).

I hope it's now clear how EME is worse, absent a cross-browser CDM spec and available CDMs for all browsers. No one should assume any of those absent conditions will arise. Not only is there not yet any evidence, we have evidence to the contrary.

/be

Current ecosystem has NPAPI that allows anybody to integrate them with any browser, including open-source ones (within limits of platforms supported by Flash/Silverlight).

EME/CDM deliberately doesn't have such API, and thanks to DMCA browser developers without a license and proprietary SDK for each CDM are not even allowed to use the CDMs.

e.g. with EME Hollywood can say that nobody can develop a browser that plays video on a TV and legally enforce that.

It's worse because of being a "standard". Plugins are at least explicitly switchable in Firefox. Will it allow switching off part of "HTML5" functionality for those who don't want any of that DRM junk in the browser?

Of course it will. Javascript and images are standards, and you can turn them off. Why would this be different?

EME means CDMs. There is no CDM API, and CDMs would likely require trusted binaries, i.e. signed software they had verified themselves. At least Flash and Silverlight work with browsers you compiled yourself.

This is not true for Chrome/Chromium, or is it? You can't get the Flash version that's in Chrome right now and use it elsewhere.

It's not officially supported, but I'm using Chromium with the PPAPI Flash plugin that comes with Chrome, and a lot of other Linux users probably are too.

What if none of the CDMs work on Linux?

What if Microsoft never made a Silverlight Player for Linux? Oh, right. What if all future "Hollywood" content required a new Flash Player Player plug-in version (say, with an update to the DRM bits?)

Are leading members of the Linux community really betting on Adobe and Microsoft support for the next decade? No? Then what's your plan?

As it stands, developers have been able to get the Windows version of Silverlight running on Linux, Netflix and all. As far as I know they haven't even been able to get the ChromeOS version of HTML5 EME working on Chromebooks in developer mode let alone anywhere else, and Microsoft's EME implementation is integrated into IE11 which is going to be a lot harder to run elsewhere than Silverlight was.

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