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Comment by michaelt | Hacker News Reader

The whole point of replacing Flash with HTML5 video is to get rid of buggy third party plugins that crash all the time and have shitty cross-platform support.

If HTML5 video is going to rely on buggy third party DRM plugins, we lose the benefit that was the whole point of HTML5 video.

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> If HTML5 video is going to rely on buggy third party DRM plugins, we lose the benefit that was the whole point of HTML5 video

Only HTML5 video that has DRM will rely on EME plugins. We've lost nothing. In fact we've gained. HTML5 video now has a strict superset of the capabilities it had before.

Without EME:

                    Flash   HTML5
                  +------+--------+
    non-DRM video | yes  |  yes   |
                  +------+--------+
    DRM video     | yes  |  no    |
                  +------+--------+

With EME:

                    Flash   HTML5
                  +------+--------+
    non-DRM video | yes  |  yes   |
                  +------+--------+
    DRM video     | yes  |  yes   |
                  +------+--------+

All video will now have DRM. We have lost video that did not have DRM.

It will now be almost as easy to implement video with DRM in production as it is to implement HTML5 video without DRM. Every provider will now use DRM. Netflix will use fancy DRM, which mostly works. Everyone else will pay $19.95 for theirs.

Never thought we were going to bring back the age of Realplayer (and the million others.)

> All video will now have DRM.

No, it won't.

> We have lost video that did not have DRM.

We may lose some because it may get easier to implement DRM and that may tip the balance for some content source.

> It will now be almost as easy to implement video with DRM in production as it is to implement HTML5 video without DRM.

But plenty of sources will still choose not to use DRM, as is the case even with other formats where DRM is well-estbalished as an option with simple toolchains.

If you aren't already using DRM , why start now?

transitions easy.

pointy haired bosses.

Before this change, being DRM free was at least somewhat pragmatic. Now it's only principles and consumer rights, and we live in a capitalist society, who the fuck cares about those?

This is a terrible development.

DRM is only desirable if you want copying your content to be more difficult. The reverse is true with the majority of content on the internet.

I run my browsers without Flash in order to avoid Adobe's exploit-du-jour crapware. This means, for example, that I don't run Chrome.

If this binary blob from Adobe isn't presented with a similar UI as regular "plugins" (that the user can disable or uninstall), then I will look into writing an extension to disable it, or perhaps rely on a Firefox fork to give me a Flash-lite(tm) free browser.

You might want to reconsider. Chrome sandboxes the Flash runtime [1], meaning a 0-day exploit in Flash alone doesn't get an attacker access to your machine.

1. http://thenextweb.com/google/2012/11/13/google-declares-flas...

What makes you so sure?

So sure of what?

That, of course, does not save you from other problems with Flash and the way developers have (ab)used it. Crappy/useless widgets on screen that serve only to eat your CPU and batteries, including banner ads and the like.

You can search for "Click to play" in the settings and disable plugins until you click on them. This helps a little security-wise, too, in case an attacker is resourceful enough to have both a 0-day for Flash and the Chrome sandbox. Not sure how likely that is, but it's also trivial to white-list sites you trust not to send you exploits from the icon in the URL box.

You could use Chromium, the open-source version of Chrome. It comes without flash, which needs to be explicitly installed to make flash work. Not sure what OS you use, but this is what I do on Linux.

You can disable Flash from chrome://plugins

> If this binary blob from Adobe isn't presented with a similar UI as regular "plugins" (that the user can disable or uninstall), then I will look into writing an extension to disable it, or perhaps rely on a Firefox fork to give me a Flash-lite(tm) free browser.

Again, it's been stated that you will be clearly given the choice to disable the CDM entirely.

Chrome now has a built-in 'flashblock', like the Firefox plugin of that name. Enable the setting and you'll not see flash unless you click a placeholder icon.

As far as I am concerned, video should be delivered to vlc via httpstreaming.

then, no browser involved.

Alternatively, the video should be made available for download as a file.

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