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Comment by dublinben | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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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