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0 pointsmakomk12y ago0 comments

Browser vendors don't have to implement any DRM scheme, but they will and sites will use them. What this means in practice is that there will be 100% standards compliant, pure HTML5 websites that can only legally be rendered in specific, proprietary browsers. The stated purpose of HTML5 EME is to make it a criminal offence under the DMCA anti-circumvention clause to develop an unauthorised browser or extension that displays the protected content.

If anything this is worse than proprietary plugins because those used documented APIs that any browser could support, whereas this is integrated into the web browser itself.

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jiggy201112y ago

If anything it's the opposite. Defining a standard interface for content decryption allows such a system to be browser agnostic. You install a module and it works in any browser which implements the spec, whether proprietary or open source.

makomkOP12y ago

Unless they've changed it since I looked, the only interface the HTML5 EME specification defines is the one between the website and the browser. There is no standardized interface between browsers and DRM modules, nor is there any requirement browsers support external content decryption modules. For example, last I heard IE was only going to support a built-in implementation of Microsoft's PlayReady which isn't available to anyone else.

In fact it's not clear that anyone can use a standardized, open API for decryption modules and meet content providers' security demands. While some of them were historically willing to use Flash which did use standard browser APIs, they've taken this as an opportunity to demand more.

jiggy201112y ago

There's a good diagram on the w3 page. https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/html-media/raw-file/tip/encrypted-med...

It looks like the idea is to implement a system where encrypted content is passed to the browser. The key is then sent through the browser to the CDM, the CDM can take the content and hand back decrypted frames.

It's entirely possible for content vendors to support multiple CDMs for different browser or OS combinations. The advantage of this is that the CDM is a smaller dependency than something like silverlight, so you can have a standard HTML5 video player interface across platforms and just swap out CDMs.

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jeltz12y ago

Yes, but it wont be OS agnostic. So it might work on all browsers on Windows but not in any one FreeBSD.

jiggy201112y ago

Not true at all, there is nothing in the spec that mandates the use of any particular OS.

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0 pointsmakomk12y ago0 comments

If anything this is worse than proprietary plugins because those used documented APIs that any browser could support, whereas this is integrated into the web browser itself.

0 comments

jiggy201112y ago

makomkOP12y ago

jiggy201112y ago

There's a good diagram on the w3 page. https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/html-media/raw-file/tip/encrypted-med...

2 more replies

jeltz12y ago

Yes, but it wont be OS agnostic. So it might work on all browsers on Windows but not in any one FreeBSD.

jiggy201112y ago

Not true at all, there is nothing in the spec that mandates the use of any particular OS.

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j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse