251–260 of 414 posts
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That day will never come[1]. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_hole
That's not practical for video in most cases - dedicated pirates will find a way around it, but casual consumers won't bother. Duplicating HD or better video by analog means without significant quality sacrifices is much easier said than done.
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Unfortunately (though it's considerably more compartmentalized and constrained than prior iterations), Google is trying to replace Flash with a DRM mechanism that also requires proprietary software. So while you might think that the advent of HTML5 video means you no longer need proprietary software to interoperate with the services that use it, Google and its partners are working to ensure that that's not true.
If you're referring to Encrypted Media Extensions it's not a DRM mechanism that requires proprietary software. It's a specification for a communication channel between a browser and Digital Rights Management agent software on the local machine. While it's not ideal, it's just some javascript functions that interact with the DRM on the computer. The DRM software itself is completely optional. It's much better than hav…
EME is a spec for a communication channel between script in a web page and a browser, with the idea that the browser then talks to a DRM module. It's not a spec for a communication channel between the browser and a DRM module.
This is important, because it means that you end up with DRM modules that are tied to a particular browser.
The NPAPI plugin situation is unfortunate in all sorts of ways, but the one good thing it had going for it was that there _was_ an API that multiple browsers all implemented, such that a single plugin binary woudl work in all of them (modulo the usual bugs and incompatibilities you have when there are multiple implementors of an API).
Unfortunately, 3 of the 4 main browser vendors also happen to be DRM vendors, and were rather united in their opposition to the W3C creating a specification for the communication channel between the browser and the DRM module.
What joy it is to finally uninstall Flash. The last time I was this happy to uninstall crappy software was when I realized that I no longer needed RealPlayer. For those that don't know it, RealPlayer was a very popular proprietary media player (with its own proprietary formats) circa 2000. The company's stock was worth $380 a share in 2000; it's now worth $6. The only explanation for RealPlayer's popularity was its D…
What joy it is to finally uninstall Flash. The last time I was this happy to uninstall crappy software was when I realized that I no longer needed RealPlayer. For those that don't know it, RealPlayer was a very popular proprietary media player (with its own proprietary formats) circa 2000. The company's stock was worth $380 a share in 2000; it's now worth $6. The only explanation for RealPlayer's popularity was its D…
Fun fact: Github uses Flash to copy link data or raw code to your clipboard.
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Still seems like a false dichotomy to me. Subscribe to Netflix and pirate your content if you have a firm believe in being DRM free while rewarding the creators of content you consume.
Last I checked, the most effective way to pirate content is via a protocol such as Bit Torrent which requires you to also distribute pirated content. And that has legal ramifications, which then requires non-trivial methods to obscure your activities (paid proxy servers, etc). Most of us use Netflix not for ideological reasons, but for the pure convenience of it. Compared to Bit-Torrent,with Netflix you can easily br…
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That's not practical for video in most cases - dedicated pirates will find a way around it, but casual consumers won't bother. Duplicating HD or better video by analog means without significant quality sacrifices is much easier said than done.
Yeah, until the video recorder on your cell phone gets a little nicer.
Is it possible to get results this way, yes of course. Are the results any good, not really. Commercial pirates work with people in the exhibition sector, amateurs rely on known weaknesses in popular disc formats. You'd have to be pretty desperate to rely on streamed media as your 'original.'
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Youtube and Twitch are the only reasons I keep Chrome around - I much rather supporting the work that Mozilla are doing with Firefox (ie a proper open source browser) than Chrome.
Out of interest, why is Firefox a 'proper' open-source browser while Chrome is not? Isn't Chrome pretty much just Chromium with a little bit of extra Google integration on top?
1) PDF viewer. 2) Flash. 3) Some audio/video codec support (e.g. Chromium has no support for MP3, AAC, H.264, or the MP4 container format; see " rel="nofollow">http://www.chromium.org/audio-video>). 4) Crash reporting, metrics, that sort of thing.
#1 and #2 are certainly closed-source. I can't speak to #3. [EDIT: as surrealize points out, #1 is no longer closed-source.]
From an end-user perspective, there's a significant difference between "browser that will play the music and the videos and show me the PDFs" and "browser that will not do those things". Chromium, while open source, is really not a viable end-user browser on today's internet.
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What's the community using instead of iTunes?
I use Clementine on Linux, and sometimes on my Mac. It handles more formats than iTunes (FLAC and OGG, maybe others), and the interface is okay, but not as polished as iTunes. I haven't used it to add or remove music from my iPhone on either platform, but the Linux version can play music from the phone, so maybe it works.
Is 'polished' some kind of euphemism in this context that I'm just missing? The last time I tried to simply copy an MP3 from my laptop to my wife's iPhone I wasted almost an hour wading through nonsense errors, online tutorials, and absurd UI before I decided it's actually impossible to copy/paste an MP3 through iTunes and downloaded a standalone free player so I could load the file to the phone through the browser.
I don't own a lot of music, I don't have a library of albums, just a folder of files I wanted to copy/paste.
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Fun fact: Github uses Flash to copy link data or raw code to your clipboard.
Only because it is literally the only way to support the feature. Nothing sneaky about it.