So Web-Restrictions is kinda unstoppable now. Instead of having a plugin-free future with HTML5 we have an even worse situation.
Indeed. Now we need to have one plugin, per browser, per operating system supported.
Guess which next emerging OS wont be able to fully access "standard-compliant" HTML5? Yeah. All of them.
W3C should be thrown to the sharks for this.
Those two companies formulated EME together with Netflix.
Hollywood and its friend likes to claim that they need DRM to prevent piracy, to prevent freeloaders from getting use of something they shouldn't. Looking at the big picture though, they are the freeloaders and they are shameless about it too.
They are more than eager to freeload on all the good parts about digital media (zero cost distribution, zero cost storage, zero cost reproduction, etc) while they insist that the business around it should still be limited to the ones they had with tangible, physical media and goods.
Not only that, they want to freeload on all the open, accessible, cross-platform technology we have developed and built to sell their restricted content. And they have the balls to demand that these open standard (which has been successful because of their openness), should now be closed to accommodate their needs!
They are hypocrites from end to end. They want and want and want, but are not willing to give an inch. They demand that we give up our freedom and valuable standards. And for what? To be able to see their content on a restricted service while we pretend its not available in a superior DRM-free format illegally everywhere else on the internet.
It's just disgusting.
Why not just let the whole DRM thing go? Let us access the content in a superior, portable format and don't ruin the future of the web over the semantics of how it gets projected onto the customers screen of choice, on their platform of choice.
The W3C made the most pragmatic choice, here. I think DRM is still crap, but one system is unambiguously better than >1.
The DRM plugin is basically just request/provide license and decrypt frame. Even if it was encrypted media extensions vs silverlight that's 100k plugin vs 10 MiB plugin.
If anything this makes Linux support easier, because you no longer have to provide support for an entire virtual machine and all APIs such as Flash or Silverlight. The only software required will be the DRM module itself as everything else can be provided by the browser.
A plugin DRM module will also have to do all of the video rendering and displaying. Because if it just hands the unencrypted stream back to the browser then you could change the browser to simply write it to disk.
The relevant DRM mechanisms will come from Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Adobe. Both Apple and Microsoft have no interest in supporting GNU/Linux. You won't get their DRM on GNU/Linux no matter how simple it is. Google seems to ship their DRM now on the GNU/Linux version of Chrome. But I don't know if the license allows using it in other browsers. Which would be hindered by the fact that Google uses their own unspecified PAPPI. Adobe wants to provide a DRM module for Firefox EME mechanism. But we all know from enough bad experience how well Adobe does GNU/Linux support. Flash on GNU/Linux was even worse than on any other system until they simply stopped it. They recently even stopped distributing Acrobat Reader for GNU/Linux. So yeah, great hope there. Even if they compile the module for GNU/Linux because Mozilla asks them to then we can expect the typical Adobe software safety and quality... Remember HTML5 was supposed to rid the world of Flash, Silverlight, and such things. Not force those binary blobs into the spec.
EME means you rely less on Adobe code than you did previously as they are no longer shipping an entire runtime, just the content protection module.
The only browser vendor who wants to implement EME via a plugin is Mozilla. Simply because there can't be a free software Restriction module implementation (and consequently due to the W3C's efforts there defacto can't be a fully free software web implementation). And Mozilla already made a deal with Adobe to provide the Restriction module.
So no, there won't be a market. It will actually close down the market. Content providers will have to support those four DRM solutions if they want to offer their content on all those platforms. They won't have any choice.
Windows Chrome user-agent for reference:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/36.0.1985.125 Safari/537.36Well, the default user agent string for Chrome already has a Safari identifier in it, but I don't think Safari user agents have a Chrome identifier. The change being made in the post doesn't add a Safari identifier, because there was one there already, but it does change the OS string to Windows. So I think the explanation in the post is probably right.
https://mobile.twitter.com/0xabad1dea/status/497122542885556...
Yep, it's definitely a bit buggy and stops occasionally but it's usable!
https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/html-media/raw-file/tip/encrypted-med...
1. the user-agent switch involves adding a Safari identifier (rather than IE or a new Chrome one)
2. at WWDC 2014, Apple announced that it had been working closely with Netflix along those lines, and that the upcoming version of Safari would be able to play Netflix without Silverlight. (And indeed Safari on Yosemite can do just that in the developer previews)