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Update on HTML5 Video for Netflix

techblog.netflix.com

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Re: Update on HTML5 Video for Netflix

#421

Post by jungletek »

blitmap wrote: post #164
jasonmp85 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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 a…

>[...]pirates don't rip from Netflix anyway.

Tell that to the 4k webrips on the private torrent trackers; I'm sure they'll be surprised both by the fact that they exist, and have apparently gained sentience.

Re: Update on HTML5 Video for Netflix

#422

Post by azernik »

braveo wrote: post #254
jshmrsn wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

algesten's comment seems entirely accurate to me. He's not claiming that the captured frame buffer will be of lower quality, but that in order to distribute it afterwords, you would need to recompress the captured frames. That recompression is where the quality reduction would occur. Everything I just said is rephrasing what is already in algesten's comment.

Because it has nothing to do with the original compression. Think of it like this. If you compress and distribute someone's wavy hand-cam pirating of a movie, the poor experience isn't due to the compression, but the way the move was recorded in the first place. likewise, recording a stream and then compressing it later, the quality isn't because of the original compression, it's because of the quality of the origina…

Recompression matters because most video compression is lossy. Every compress/decompress cycle introduces noise and artifacts.

Re: Update on HTML5 Video for Netflix

#423

Post by rb666 »

wwalser wrote: post #400
flukus wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Mozilla doesn't have as much leverage now that a large part of "the community" has abandoned Firefox for Chrome. If you care about these issues, stop and consider the effect of your choice in user agent. Mozilla still has nearly an order of magnitude more market share than they did when activex was everywhere.

At the time that Firefox started really turning heads, it took an order of magnitude less money to build a better browser. JIT innovations that were once just good research ideas from the Smalltalk world had an open source implementation in Java which then got ported to open source dynamic languages like Python (see polymorphic inline caching & similar techniques). Then Adobe came along and donated a bunch of it's JI…

I encourage you to try out Firefox Nightly. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis has made me switch from Chrome to FF as the experience has improved greatly.

Re: Update on HTML5 Video for Netflix

#424

Post by frik »

noir_lord wrote: post #11
jasonmp85 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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 in…

> 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.

Re: Update on HTML5 Video for Netflix

#425

Post by Razengan »

problems wrote: post #417
Razengan wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> content shouldn't be controlled (or that I, as a buyer of content, should control the content I bought) How should content creators protect against people who access their content without buying it?

They quite frankly can't technically, only legally - they're selling a 0 margin good, anyone who has it can basically give away infinite copies at zero cost per additional copy. Anyone who wants it for free will have it for free. They need no more than drop a few words into Google or type the name of something into a fully automatic tool like Sonarr. It's pointless for them to bother trying to stop piracy, especially…

So how do we ensure people keep making quality content and software? Should they give it away for free by default and just count on charity?

Seems to me the only ultimate solution is to have some kind of guaranteed basic income, at least for all people that aren't involved in the creation of tangible goods (that can't be copied at zero cost).

Re: Update on HTML5 Video for Netflix

#426

Post by frik »

greenhouse_gas wrote: post #132
jasonmp85 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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 d…

ECE provider is Adobe (can we assume it shares some code from Flash DRM ?).

Re: Update on HTML5 Video for Netflix

#427

Post by frik »

apostacy wrote: post #127

This is the strategy Microsoft tried over a decade ago with ActiveX. And Firefox saved us. It was starting to be normalized, to have to install ActiveX controls to view certain content. Companies like CinemaNow[1] offered Netflix-like streaming movie services using Microsoft's ActiveX based Janus DRM over a decade ago. Thankfully, the community had more of a backbone back then. Firefox and Linux were not broken becau…

Now such companies lobby for WebAssembly. A software blob running in your browser. It's actually similar evil as ECE.

They will recompile their old rusty software to the web. eg Newspapers will make websites as blob-applications - Adblockers won't work any more. New forms of DRM will slip into web world this way.

We need a fork of Firefox/Servo-based/Chronium that is more lightweight, becomes mainstream pretty fast with a great community and has no inbuilt DRM and no WebAssembly support.

Re: Update on HTML5 Video for Netflix

#428

Post by rimliu »

davexunit wrote: post #10
cyborgx7 wrote: post #2

Translation: Netflix successfully lobied DRM into what is supposed to be the OPEN web standard, to the point where even Firefox couldn't afford not to support it. Dark days for the free exchange of information enabled by the web.

Dark days, indeed. Sacrificing the open web so some can watch movies.

How does it sacrifice the open web again? Is there a law being passed that entire web should be DRMed?

Re: Update on HTML5 Video for Netflix

#429

Post by josteink »

dasil003 wrote: post #231
cyborgx7 wrote: post #2

Translation: Netflix successfully lobied DRM into what is supposed to be the OPEN web standard, to the point where even Firefox couldn't afford not to support it. Dark days for the free exchange of information enabled by the web.

Sorry, but as someone who spent nearly a decade founding and building a premium content VOD service, and 6 of those years fighting fiercely against DRM and making great content available without DRM, I have both the knowledge and moral authority to say that you're living in a fantasy world. You might as well say that anyone who is not living an RMS-sanctioned ascetic technology lifestyle is hurting the cause of free…

> Sorry, but as someone who spent nearly a decade founding and building a premium content VOD service, and 6 of those years fighting fiercely against DRM and making great content available without DRM, I have both the knowledge and moral authority to say that you're living in a fantasy world. .... EME is a ideological compromise, sure, but it's a net benefit to the open web

If you need DRM, nobody is forcing you to create a solution based on a open-platform. Go make a OS and platform-specific app instead.

I mean... That's what EME makes browsers and web-sites into anyway. You now have so called "web-sites" where your OS and platform has to be "supported".

And then you might as well make a native app. Like Netflix does. Like Spotify does. Like everyone does.

We don't need DRM in our open standard.

Re: Update on HTML5 Video for Netflix

#430

Post by Kliment »

kelnos wrote: post #334
CaptSpify wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People want to watch what they want to watch. You keep using this phrase. Doesn't that also suggest that, if given enough trouble, they will just pirate that content instead? DRM has shown to do very little to stop that, so why continue pretending that it does.

> You keep using this phrase. Doesn't that also suggest that, if given enough trouble, they will just pirate that content instead? DRM has shown to do very little to stop that, so why continue pretending that it does. Yes, but, in general, trouble has been decreasing, and so has the need to pirate. I would argue that there are only three kinds of people who pirate anymore: 1. People who want a local copy of the conte…

4 is still a thing because of exclusives and regional restrictions meaning that you need a growing number of subscriptions to access a chosen subset of content, and it might not be available at all in your region
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