4 ms·

This was one of many possible moments. How well did it work when they didn't support H.264? They're picking their battles.

by Rusky 12y ago

serge2k 12y ago
and if they choose to battle for privacy and proper DNT it makes a lot more sense than a losing battle against DRM. The most annoying part of this is that Abobe is providing the plugin. Much rather Mozilla do their own thing.
- admax88q 12y ago
  DNT is a non-starter. It's asking companies to play nice and please please please don't track users. That's never going to be a reliable option. Blocking third-party cookies by default on the other hand is a good start.
- bzbarsky 12y ago
  Mozilla can't really do their own thing unless they start writing some closed-source code. And then negotiating directly with various content providers about what the code will do. Probably a few other things I haven't thought of as well. It's all possible, but it'd be a pretty big difference from what Mozilla does normally and I'm not sure they'd be very good at it. So outsourcing that stuff makes a good bit of sense.
makomk 12y ago
This was the last possible moment. Once the web is full of DRMed content, they're entirely beholden to any demands that their DRM partners and content providers might make, like removing the privacy safeguards and giving the binary DRM module full access to the system so it can make sure code outside the sandbox isn't siphoning off the decoded video, extending the DRM to images or even HTML, etc...
Daiz 12y ago
I'd just like to point out that the H.264 issue is way smaller than this. H.264 is a public standard that anyone is free to implement. This is why FOSS encoders and decoders for it can freely exist without any issues (and the FOSS x264 encoder also happens to be pretty much the best H.264 encoder in the world too). The complications arise from the fact that a lot of tech used in H.264 is patented (software) and licensing of said patents is required in many cases to make use of it. But all in all, H.264 is still quite compatible with FOSS (and would be perfectly compatible if software patents didn't exist), whereas DRM is completely incompatible due to its secret nature. This is a far bigger issue for Mozilla to compromise on.
- async5 12y ago
  > H.264 is a public standard that anyone is free to implement. That's correct -- you can implement it. But you have to pay for its usage. See http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/avc/Documents/AVC_TermsSummary.pdf http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/avc/Documents/AVC_TermsS... EDIT: guess who is paying for this?

This was one of many possible moments. How well did it work when they didn't support H.264? They're picking their battles.

by Rusky 12y ago

This was one of many possible moments. How well did it work when they didn't support H.264? They're picking their battles.

serge2k 12y ago

and if they choose to battle for privacy and proper DNT it makes a lot more sense than a losing battle against DRM. The most annoying part of this is that Abobe is providing the plugin. Much rather Mozilla do their own thing.

admax88q 12y ago
DNT is a non-starter. It's asking companies to play nice and please please please don't track users. That's never going to be a reliable option. Blocking third-party cookies by default on the other hand is a good start.
bzbarsky 12y ago
Mozilla can't really do their own thing unless they start writing some closed-source code. And then negotiating directly with various content providers about what the code will do. Probably a few other things I haven't thought of as well. It's all possible, but it'd be a pretty big difference from what Mozilla does normally and I'm not sure they'd be very good at it. So outsourcing that stuff makes a good bit of sense.

makomk 12y ago

This was the last possible moment. Once the web is full of DRMed content, they're entirely beholden to any demands that their DRM partners and content providers might make, like removing the privacy safeguards and giving the binary DRM module full access to the system so it can make sure code outside the sandbox isn't siphoning off the decoded video, extending the DRM to images or even HTML, etc...

Daiz 12y ago

I'd just like to point out that the H.264 issue is way smaller than this. H.264 is a public standard that anyone is free to implement. This is why FOSS encoders and decoders for it can freely exist without any issues (and the FOSS x264 encoder also happens to be pretty much the best H.264 encoder in the world too). The complications arise from the fact that a lot of tech used in H.264 is patented (software) and licensing of said patents is required in many cases to make use of it. But all in all, H.264 is still quite compatible with FOSS (and would be perfectly compatible if software patents didn't exist), whereas DRM is completely incompatible due to its secret nature. This is a far bigger issue for Mozilla to compromise on.

async5 12y ago
> H.264 is a public standard that anyone is free to implement. That's correct -- you can implement it. But you have to pay for its usage. See http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/avc/Documents/AVC_TermsSummary.pdf http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/avc/Documents/AVC_TermsS... EDIT: guess who is paying for this?