Re:The W3C's plan for DRM in HTML5 is a betrayal for all web...
by bzbarsky on Wednesday April 24, 2013 @01:19AM
(#5599984)
Well, one difference is that currently existing plug-in frameworks have well-defined APIs that are used to talk to the plug-in. This is why the same plug-in binary blob can be used in Firefox and Safari and Opera and Chrome, for example: they all implement NPAPI.
One issue with the current EME spec is that it doesn't actually define an API for the browser to interact with the CDM. It defines an API for in-page JS to ask the browser to interact with the CDM, which is the web-facing bit, but how browsers and CDMs interact is entirely undefined.
What that means in practice is that it would be perfectly spec-compliant for Google to ship a CDM that only works with Chrome, for Microsoft to ship one that only works with IE, and for Apple to ship one that only works with Safari. Should you then have the misfortune of not using one of those browsers, you wouldn't be able to view the video in question.
Oddly enough, Google, Apple, and Microsoft are all in favor of this part of the spec last I checked.
One issue with the current EME spec is that it doesn't actually define an API for the browser to interact with the CDM. It defines an API for in-page JS to ask the browser to interact with the CDM, which is the web-facing bit, but how browsers and CDMs interact is entirely undefined.
What that means in practice is that it would be perfectly spec-compliant for Google to ship a CDM that only works with Chrome, for Microsoft to ship one that only works with IE, and for Apple to ship one that only works with Safari. Should you then have the misfortune of not using one of those browsers, you wouldn't be able to view the video in question.
Oddly enough, Google, Apple, and Microsoft are all in favor of this part of the spec last I checked.