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Yes, having spent the last decade founding and building a premium content streaming service I am well aware of what EME is and how the CDMs work. It is infinit

Yes, having spent the last decade founding and building a premium content streaming service I am well aware of what EME is and how the CDMs work. It is infinitely preferable to a proprietary plugin.

throwaway2048 11y ago
How? It is totally inoperable without a proprietary plugin backing it up.
- dasil003 11y ago
  Because everything else happening on the page is still regular web stuff, not encapsulated in a proprietary plugin like Flash. Essentially much smaller surface area of proprietary stuff, and because each browser only implements one CDM and they are responsible for the integration it doesn't break as much the way that Flash increasingly did over time.
  - pdkl95 11y ago
    If I go to a page with a video on it that uses flash, the rest of the page works just fine if I don't have the flash plugin installed. This is identical behavior to not having the CDM. If the rest of the page also uses flash, that's entirely separate. It is even possible that the rest of the page could be flash, while playing a video with either the native <video> tag or through a CDM. Integration between the video and the rest of the page is going to break without {video tag support with the necessary codec,flash,EME support with the necessary CDM}. Again, there is no difference. You're trying to pretend that there is somehow a more usable page with EME+CDM over flash, when most of the time the video was the goal. > having spent the last decade founding and building a premium content streaming service You're fighting against the General Purpose Computer. Sorry, you don't get to run code on my computer without my approval. You don't get to turn my General Purpose Computer into an appliance. If you care at all about preserving any control over your own General Purpose Computers, stop. You've already spent a decade building the seeds of technology that lock down the web. Now John Deere has used the same ideas to take away property rights. You are adding difficulties to legitimate users while the pirates ignore your CDM and go straight to torrents/etc. Was the delusion that you're protecting anything worth these costs?
    - dasil003 11y ago
      I grant you that the point is largely video, and I probably made a poor choice to reference other things happening on the page, but even within purely the video playback, a CDM is hands down far less proprietary code than a plugin like Flash which not only is poorly optimized for any given browser, but also introduces a whole host of other issues which a CDM doesn't get anywhere near (eg. flash cookies). The rest of your comment is just straight up offensive zealotry. Spare me the ideological rants and go re-read my opening comment carefully. I spent the first 7 years fighting against DRM in direct conversation with rights holders. I have signed deals with hundreds of small distributors to stream content without DRM. I have done more for the cause of avoiding DRM in practice than a million EFF press releases which do nothing but preach to the choir. Furthermore, I am not building DRM, I am only implementing existing industry-standard DRM as required by studios. I can choose not to do so, in which case I won't get the content I need to build a viable business, and then I will go out of business, but the status quo will not have changed. This nonsense about me forcing you to run code on your computer without your approval is asinine. I am not forcing you to run anything, run what you want, but I'm not allowed to stream certain content to you without it, that is beyond my control. If you only want unencumbered content, then don't use my service. This is not the same class of issue as nerfed hardware like John Deere. Like it or not, there is a legitimate reason for legal copyright which is inherently different from property rights, and conflating the two completely undermines any legitimate point which you might wish to make.
      - simoncion 11y ago
        > ...a CDM is hands down far less proprietary code than a plugin like Flash Sure, but it still relies a binary blob, just like Flash. > ...I am only implementing existing industry-standard DRM as required by studios. I can choose not to do so, in which case I won't get the content I need to build a viable business, and then I will go out of business, but the status quo will not have changed. Don't forget the story of how Apple forced the music industry into abandoning DRM on their "high-value intellectual property". Had Google, Mozilla, Apple, and Microsoft all refused to play ball, and also continued to push towards the removal of Flash and Silverlight from the web, we would likely soon be seeing either the same abandonment of DRM'd streaming video, or the abandonment of streaming video by the major studios (and subsequent void filling by smaller players).
- ubernostrum 11y ago
  I was working for Mozilla when EME first came up, and sat in one of the big sessions at that year's Mozilla Summit about it. Wrote up some thoughts here: http://www.b-list.org/weblog/2013/oct/16/eme/ http://www.b-list.org/weblog/2013/oct/16/eme/

Yes, having spent the last decade founding and building a premium content streaming service I am well aware of what EME is and how the CDMs work. It is infinitely preferable to a proprietary plugin.

throwaway2048 11y ago

How? It is totally inoperable without a proprietary plugin backing it up.

dasil003 11y ago
Because everything else happening on the page is still regular web stuff, not encapsulated in a proprietary plugin like Flash. Essentially much smaller surface area of proprietary stuff, and because each browser only implements one CDM and they are responsible for the integration it doesn't break as much the way that Flash increasingly did over time.
- pdkl95 11y ago
  If I go to a page with a video on it that uses flash, the rest of the page works just fine if I don't have the flash plugin installed. This is identical behavior to not having the CDM. If the rest of the page also uses flash, that's entirely separate. It is even possible that the rest of the page could be flash, while playing a video with either the native <video> tag or through a CDM. Integration between the video and the rest of the page is going to break without {video tag support with the necessary codec,flash,EME support with the necessary CDM}. Again, there is no difference. You're trying to pretend that there is somehow a more usable page with EME+CDM over flash, when most of the time the video was the goal. > having spent the last decade founding and building a premium content streaming service You're fighting against the General Purpose Computer. Sorry, you don't get to run code on my computer without my approval. You don't get to turn my General Purpose Computer into an appliance. If you care at all about preserving any control over your own General Purpose Computers, stop. You've already spent a decade building the seeds of technology that lock down the web. Now John Deere has used the same ideas to take away property rights. You are adding difficulties to legitimate users while the pirates ignore your CDM and go straight to torrents/etc. Was the delusion that you're protecting anything worth these costs?
  - dasil003 11y ago
    I grant you that the point is largely video, and I probably made a poor choice to reference other things happening on the page, but even within purely the video playback, a CDM is hands down far less proprietary code than a plugin like Flash which not only is poorly optimized for any given browser, but also introduces a whole host of other issues which a CDM doesn't get anywhere near (eg. flash cookies). The rest of your comment is just straight up offensive zealotry. Spare me the ideological rants and go re-read my opening comment carefully. I spent the first 7 years fighting against DRM in direct conversation with rights holders. I have signed deals with hundreds of small distributors to stream content without DRM. I have done more for the cause of avoiding DRM in practice than a million EFF press releases which do nothing but preach to the choir. Furthermore, I am not building DRM, I am only implementing existing industry-standard DRM as required by studios. I can choose not to do so, in which case I won't get the content I need to build a viable business, and then I will go out of business, but the status quo will not have changed. This nonsense about me forcing you to run code on your computer without your approval is asinine. I am not forcing you to run anything, run what you want, but I'm not allowed to stream certain content to you without it, that is beyond my control. If you only want unencumbered content, then don't use my service. This is not the same class of issue as nerfed hardware like John Deere. Like it or not, there is a legitimate reason for legal copyright which is inherently different from property rights, and conflating the two completely undermines any legitimate point which you might wish to make.
    - simoncion 11y ago
      > ...a CDM is hands down far less proprietary code than a plugin like Flash Sure, but it still relies a binary blob, just like Flash. > ...I am only implementing existing industry-standard DRM as required by studios. I can choose not to do so, in which case I won't get the content I need to build a viable business, and then I will go out of business, but the status quo will not have changed. Don't forget the story of how Apple forced the music industry into abandoning DRM on their "high-value intellectual property". Had Google, Mozilla, Apple, and Microsoft all refused to play ball, and also continued to push towards the removal of Flash and Silverlight from the web, we would likely soon be seeing either the same abandonment of DRM'd streaming video, or the abandonment of streaming video by the major studios (and subsequent void filling by smaller players).
ubernostrum 11y ago
I was working for Mozilla when EME first came up, and sat in one of the big sessions at that year's Mozilla Summit about it. Wrote up some thoughts here: http://www.b-list.org/weblog/2013/oct/16/eme/ http://www.b-list.org/weblog/2013/oct/16/eme/