10 ms·

Yes, the world was better when Flash and Silverlight were the media of choice for delivering video.

• mmagin 10y ago
  Nevermind that the binary blobs come from pretty much the same place: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Media/EME#Platform_Support https://wiki.mozilla.org/Media/EME#Platform_Support (Ok, I guess on Linux it's a blob from a Google-owned company.)
  • hsivonen 10y ago
    The previous DRM plug-in (Silverlight) was made by Microsoft. The new one (Widevine CDM) is made by Google.
    • OhSoHumble 10y ago
      I was hopeful that the announcement from Mozilla applied to BSD. If Widevine is used, then this will be Linux only. Still good news, however.
• JoshTriplett 10y ago
  It was indeed, since people had started recognizing the problems with Flash and Silverlight, and they'd have been much easier to kill off. DRM should have stayed second-class, leaving the way open for competitors to offer a first-class web experience as long as they left DRM behind.
  • cmsimike 10y ago
    > leaving the way open for competitors to offer a first-class web experience as long as they left DRM behind. Competitors already exist in this area. Here is GoG's listening of DRM-free movies: https://www.gog.com/movies?sort=bestselling&page=1 https://www.gog.com/movies?sort=bestselling&page=1 It is very rare that I find something I want to watch here, where as the content I generally want to watch, sadly, exists behind a DRM-wall. Services/competitors are a dime a dozen, but the issue is driving users to your service, and I don't believe users will run to watch content they don't want to watch just because it is DRM free. I also don't feel like we will force content creators to go DRM free since, as we're seeing, everyone is releasing their own streaming service, which would include DRM.
  • mozumder 10y ago
    Sorry, but Hollywood has the upper hand here. Hollywood has no desire to enter an open platform. They're completely happy if none of their movies are online, ever. Really. They already have a massively profitable distribution system in the theaters. The problem is that people want to watch Hollywood movies on their computer, including people that use Linux. So what do you tell those people to do? Tell them run Windows? Have them go watch it in the theater? And they have copyright controls that can force offline sites that host copyrighted content in various countries. So DRM is the tech industry's way to kiss these people ass. It may be flawed or may not work, but it's still ass-kissing. They're the artists, they get to decide what they do with their art. The consumer has no right to an artists creation. Their only choice is to pay up or ignore it. And you'll find that this happens to other art mediums as well. There are many, many art galleries that won't sell certain works of art if they deem your ownership as insufficient. Literally - the customer is wrong.
    • yuhong 10y ago
      I wonder why Hollywood was taken over by lawyers in the first place. Yes, I am going back to before Sony vs Universal.
      • ethbro 10y ago
        For the same reason that most fields eventually attract lawyers - Hollywood was making lots and lots of money.
        • yuhong 10y ago
          Which makes me more interested in more details on why.
      • pjc50 10y ago
        Hollywood got its start in escaping Edison's patent lawyers (and hired goons); that's part of why it's on the west cost in the first place.
    • WizzleKake 10y ago
• noir_lord 10y ago
  That wasn't his central point I don't think, also Flash and Silverlight where largely beaten by the Open Web because they never got the adoption sufficient to rival it. So instead they lobbied for it to be built in, the day will come when view source won't work anymore because everything fed down will protected by DRM and we moved another step closer to turning the web into a gigantic walled garden for whoever the incumbents are at that point in time.
  • gsnedders 10y ago
    Flash's peak marketshare was over 99%. They had the adoption.
    • Razengan 10y ago
      Until Steve Jobs slew it, or so I'm told.
  • camus2 10y ago
    > That wasn't his central point I don't think, also Flash and Silverlight where largely beaten by the Open Web because they never got the adoption sufficient to rival it. this is a false statement, Flash was ubiquitous. Still today every chrome user on desktop has a flash player. Obviously, this isn't true for mobile, but before the mobile era flash was basically on every Windows and Mac computer with a browser.
    • noir_lord 10y ago
      Merely been installed isn't adoption, if 99% of my web time is using HTML/JS to render content and 1% of that time Flash then do the web browser and flash have the same adoption?. By that metric notepad would be the most adopted programmer text editor in the world..
  • frik 10y ago
    > the day will come when view source won't work Yes, with WebAssembly. (With ASM.js, the predecessor it was still JS, but hard to read as human.) that's why WebAssembly is bad for the open web. In near future we will see binary blob SaaS like full Office running in browser. So the 1990s vision of vendor lock-in come to a full circle.
• jasonkostempski 10y ago
  It would be better if the platforms that wanted DRM just made their own damn desktop apps, just like they make their own iOS apps, Android apps, Roku apps, smart tv apps, etc. There's no reason for them to be embedded in a browser.
  • deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  • mtgx 10y ago
    The irony is that Netflix does have a desktop application as well.
    • jasonkostempski 10y ago
      Not for Linux and I know first had that the Windows Store one is complete garbage because I really wanted it to work. The Hulu one is just as bad.
      • flukus 10y ago
        I've used the windows one a fair bit and would take it over the browser one any day. The desktop one wins for resource usage alone.
        • jasonkostempski 10y ago
          For me, it usually wouldn't start up (some oddball Windows Store error, probably because I don't sign into my machine with a Microsoft ID) and streaming quality was horrible, especially at the beginning, and there was no way to tell it to wait longer for buffering.
    • futurix 10y ago
      This is mostly a side effect of their development efforts for Xbox and Windows 10 Mobile.
  • hsivonen 10y ago
• deleted 10y ago
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• Yver 10y ago
  How is that even an argument? That's a false dilemma. The choice isn't limited to binary blob Flash/Silverlight vs binary blob DRM plugin.
  • acdha 10y ago
    What other option was seriously on offer? I buy DRM-free music but the video options are extremely limited to a few committed proponents — I love them for that but it's like saying nobody should buy conventional agribusiness food because you can buy organic free-trade kombucha.
• greenhouse_gas 10y ago
  The thing is that there is (for all intents and purposes) no difference between ECE and plugins. Actually, ECE is a plugin. The only difference is that it helps web-designers switch plugin providers. That's it. No more security. No more standardization. As a user, you still depend on the goodwill of the ECE provider throw you a bone. If you use a slightly niche OS (say, OpenBSD on ARM), you're out of luck. If Adobe decides that it's not worth their time to develop a plugin for PaleMoon, they won't and you're out of luck (or will MS let their ECE plugin run on Linux, or Google's run on FF?). You (as a user) won't be able to switch to another provider. It all depends on the provider.
  • djrogers 10y ago
    I completely understand and sympathize with your point, however this: "If you use a slightly niche OS (say, OpenBSD on ARM)" Is rather hilarious - calling OpenBSD on ARM a 'slightly niche' OS in the context of 'operating systems people use to watch video on the web' is rather ambitious, don't you think? OpenBSD on ARM would have to increase it's user base in this arena by a couple orders of magnitude to elevate itself to 'slightly niche'....
    • greenhouse_gas 10y ago
      I picked two relativity popular platforms, though niche together to focus on the danger. All the more so would something like the rust os have problems. The bigger issue will be when these providers will start holding OS's hostage (well, you want to view half the web? You've got to have a locked bootloader and only I have the key. You want to index our sites? Google has permission (the unlocking key) but not you).
    • merb 10y ago
      isn't the Nintendo Switch based on either OpenBSD or FreeBSD and uses ARM? woudn't that be a good reason to have a plugin for that? > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_Switch_system_software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_Switch_system_softwar...
      • 10y ago
• nikcub 10y ago
  One of the only positives to come out of these new standards was that NPAPI could be deprecated. We've arguably replaced an insecure and general purpose open interface to proprietary blobs with more narrow and single purpose open interfaces to proprietary blobs.
• blitmap 10y ago
  The problem is DRM has been used for more than digital rights management. We've seen it used to surveill the user and collect information - and restrict actions on the users' computer when it thinks you're doing something illicit (not allowing you to burn things to disc, restricting the ability to screenshot videos, uninstalling/deleting programs, adding rootkits, etc). Far outside the scope of providing authorized access to protected content. What's terrible is Netflix could have used it's considerable influence to tell _that_ _Industry_ that we won't walk this walk anymore. EME - as I understand it - allows them to create a closed-source program that runs in a sandbox to authorize and reproduce content we've paid to view. It should have very limited ability to do this - but breaking out of sandboxes is what some software engineers are employed to figure out. We're trusting those companies with the ability to run their programs on our computer so we can watch Paul Blart: Mall Cop. We hope it works as it's defined, but it's not a guarantee. It's not worth it and pirates don't rip from Netflix anyway. They usually work for the industry as some part of the distribution/theater network. This hurts the customer. Our computers are not our own.
  • threeseed 10y ago
    The idea that Netflix could tell the movie and TV industries what to do is laughable and woefully ignorant of how those industries work. Why do you think Netflix et al invests so much in original content ? Because they have zero leverage and are beholden to the whims of Hollywood.
  • daenney 10y ago
    > What's terrible is Netflix could have used it's considerable influence to tell _that_ _Industry_ that we won't walk this walk anymore. Why do you assume they didn't? And if they did and the industry said no, what should they have done? Walk away, lose access to all its content, see a large part of their subscriber base move to different services that do support DRM and therefor get the content and eventually have to start firing employees as their income drops? Just about any streaming service has this exact same problem. They don't love DRM nor want to support it, it's annoying and cumbersome. But it's how you get access to the content. And unless you can survive purely on your own content you don't really have the option to walk away over your ideals. If you want DRM out of the system, convince the content/rights holders that DRM isn't in their best interests, i.e they can make more money without it or at the very least won't lose money over not having it. If you're hoping that somehow a significant enough size of the population will boycott it for the industry to change, based on the ideals of the open web and open access, you'll be waiting a long time.
• camus2 10y ago
  How about the DRM stays out of the free web entirely? You want DRM? develop your own desktop app.