Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Reconciling Mozilla’s Mission and the W3C EME

andreasgal.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–195 of 195 posts

Re: Reconciling Mozilla’s Mission and the W3C EME

#191

Post by shmerl »

cben wrote: post #175
shmerl wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What profit? Netflix offers rentals only, and no sales. And Netflix DRM doesn't prevent any piracy since users who want to illegally retain the copy can do it either way. So what is the reason for them using it? They can simply use sales and have the same profit.

But the right owners also license same movies for sale via other channels, and they (I presume) agree to lower price for Neflix because it's only rentals.

Physical media is a very different market with different mechanisms. In the digital space there are no major offerings with selling files with video so far (besides small local examples like Headweb), so there is no segmenting like mentioned above.

Re: Reconciling Mozilla’s Mission and the W3C EME

#192

Post by darkmighty »

mike_hearn wrote: post #81
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody really uses the analog hole. It's actually easier to do it digitally, and will remain so, because securing a device against arbitrarily many attackers with physical access and arbitrarily large amounts of time and resources is a practical impossibility. The analog hole is just the formal proof that DRM can never be effective, because if you can see it or hear it you can record it.

Actually Cinavia is an interesting example of trying to close the analog hole. You can point a camcorder at your screen and record a movie, but if you try and play that recording back on a fancy TV or BluRay player, it still won't work because the audio track has encoded instructions in it saying "expect an encrypted/DRMd media stream". If the player sees the content expects to be DRMd, it silences the audio after ab…

That's quite interesting! Does it rely on steganography? Because as far as I know, it's quite difficult to keep the integrity of stego contents if the system is public knowledge (e.g. a low pass filter may destroy high frequency watermaking). The sheer amount of degrees of freedom in a minute of 30fps 4k video though makes it seem not so hard to accomplish a steep ( video quality x decoding probability ) tradeoff for attackers.

Of course, then there's the software integrity problem -- I can't imagine a feasible system that prevents bypassing the software verification completely. Or, for hardware checks, I can't see a regulation enforcing "All TVs must have this enabled" (i.e. you just buy from an open brand).

This would be more interesting though for authenticated video streaming. Imagine every user is required to reveal a real identity to retrieve content. Then they can not only watermark the content but point to the exact user responsible, as long as the content has enough degrees of freedom to support it. Makes file sharing a lot harder if you can be held responsible after an indefinite period.

Re: Reconciling Mozilla’s Mission and the W3C EME

#193

Post by EdwardDiego »

EdwardDiego wrote: post #187
wfjackson wrote: post #17

The writing was on the wall a while ago once Google implemented this into Chrome(Netflix on Chromebooks was the first real world use of this IIRC). Firefox no longer has the market power it once used to have thanks to Chrome being bundled and installed by default with Flash, Acrobat and Java updates etc. Google has been spending massively on pushing Chrome even bundled as default on new machines with OEM agreements t…

> . Firefox no longer has the market power it once used to have thanks to Chrome being bundled and installed by default with Flash, Acrobat and Java updates etc. Firefox also went through a very long period of being a memory heavy browser with multiple tabs and the UI sharing a single thread of execution for JS execution - meaning that one badly behaving website could render the entire browser unresponsive. ...at lea…

I love the person who downvoted this without any response. Am I wrong about the technical challenges Firefox faced?

Re: Reconciling Mozilla’s Mission and the W3C EME

#194

Post by mpyne »

gpvos wrote: post #59
mpyne wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Firefox is about empowering users, unless those users should be so bold as to do something that's totally bad for me–I mean, them"

Please explain. In what way is it totally bad for davexunit?

The logic seems to be that if Firefox supports EME, that movie producers will be able to switch to using it without business pressure to release completely DRM-free versions of media.

It's an argument I'm partial to myself, having run a Linux box for more than a decade, but it's still an argument based on self-interest.

Re: Reconciling Mozilla’s Mission and the W3C EME

#195

Post by mike_hearn »

darkmighty wrote: post #192
mike_hearn wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually Cinavia is an interesting example of trying to close the analog hole. You can point a camcorder at your screen and record a movie, but if you try and play that recording back on a fancy TV or BluRay player, it still won't work because the audio track has encoded instructions in it saying "expect an encrypted/DRMd media stream". If the player sees the content expects to be DRMd, it silences the audio after ab…

That's quite interesting! Does it rely on steganography? Because as far as I know, it's quite difficult to keep the integrity of stego contents if the system is public knowledge (e.g. a low pass filter may destroy high frequency watermaking). The sheer amount of degrees of freedom in a minute of 30fps 4k video though makes it seem not so hard to accomplish a steep ( video quality x decoding probability ) tradeoff for…

It watermarks into the audio track and is by all accounts incredibly sophisticated and robust. Pirates have been trying to destroy the watermarks for years and all they achieved is making the soundtrack unlistenable.

For bypassing the software verification, it can be made quite hard although it's kind of irrelevant today because it only became mandatory (via BluRay Consortium "regulations") in 2012. So there are still lots of players around that don't do it and this will be the case for the forseeable future. Verance is doing a big push to get it into TVs and other things but I'm not sure how successful they are being. The technology works without a doubt but of course when you add up licensing costs, etc, it's not always necessarily a win.

Post reply on HN