831–840 of 1001 posts
My fear is that DRM for video content will quickly become DRM for text content. Say goodbye to adblocking and tracker blocking.
This is what canvas+webASM is designed to do. Legit content and tracking scripts will be delivered to your browser as a single binary blob.
If someone actually wanted to do this, it would've been done a long time ago, with a single JavaScript blob.
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Not really. If it's available to view, it's available. Full stop. There's no way around that. You can't magically change the universe so that content that's viewed can't be captured. It HAS to be converted to analog somewhere. That signal can always be captured and converted back to a digital form that's no longer embedded with DRM. Best case: you make it marginally more difficult for a mom&pop computer user to copy…
Consider Intel ME, which has the full control over your device independently on the operating system. If it somehow works together with the DRM module, the DRM will work.
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>> It could be easy to view but hard to save and distribute. Why can't it? > They've been trying to accomplish this for many years now, to no avail. Any evidence that they haven't had any success whatsoever in making it harder to save/distribute?
Sure. Search for a recent videogame on pirate bay, download a youtube-to-mp3 browser extension, get the calibre DeDRM plugin. Or, if you really want to understand my point, download and learn how to use a disassembler. For the casual law-abiding user, it succeeds in making it harder to save/distribute. For everyone else, it's only a matter of time before the DRM is broken.
And casual users might be law-abiding in the USA, but not everywhere :)
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This is a paranoid slippery slope. EME existed for several years already, and was implemented in browsers. Standardization doesn't change much. And no one except the big movie producers even wants to use DRM. If you don't watch movies on the web, you'll never see DRM. Firefox is DRM-free by default. It will download Widevine CDM if you start watching Netflix, but you can untick a flag in the settings to completely fo…
> Firefox is DRM-free by default. It is now. But next year? In five years? And if it's gone, then what? > This is a paranoid slippery slope. Well, it's a slippery slope. And I do tend to plan for the worst. Plus a safety factor.
The "OMG EVERYTHING WILL BE DRM" panic is not new. We've had widely available DRM back when Flash was super popular. And still, to this day, the only DRM'd thing is movies.
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I agree. Back in the dark ages, when the battle of www vs Gopher was still on, I sided heavily on the side of Gopher because it didn't get in the way of the content. Gopher was a means to navigate the maze of content and most of the content was textual, postscript and neatly typeset. You could sit down with it and read it focused or print it out. We've regressed to the point where 5KiB of text comes with 2MiB of crap…
This is why I usually use just lynx.
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I think you're discounting the opportunity cost here. In a world where browser manufacturers, as a block, refused to implement DRM, it's seems obvious that sooner or later visual media producers would be forced to the table, to gain access to paying consumers. We could be in a DRM-free world, without the inconveniences of elaborate technical restrictions on pass-through and mutual device compatibility, or black box b…
I see how that gets us to a DRM-free world, but not so much why ordinary consumers would care. To a first approximation, no ordinary consumer uses TPB. Unauthorized copies are less convenient (especially since mainstream playback devices won't play them) and frequently of lower quality. The price point for legitimate copies is low enough that the purchase decision isn't that hard. A standards body is a great place to…
You can download entire BluRay disks, about 40GB, 4K shows, 10GB IIRC.
You are wrong. Pirates have the same or HIGHER quality video in most cases.
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You don't need to embrace DRM in order to stop using Adobe flash. The multiple browser currently in use for the last few years that don't have adobe flash installed is a rather strong proof of that. you would have an argument if EME came first and then flash had started to decline, but that is a false history. Flash started decline many years ago, and EME was forced onto the standard as an reaction to that. W3C aband…
Netflix has never existed without DRM. Flash, Winevine or whatever other technology they use, they've always had something. Without it, they would never be allowed to exist by the people who own the content. It's naive to believe they would just stop using DRM magically. They would find another more hacky, less secure and less user-friendly solution, and everyone would be worse for it.
Lets be honest here. The argument being presented is that Netflix might create a new form of DRM without EME. We might get something worse then flash. There might even be a bad argument that Netflix and the content creator will abandon the market and millions in revenue if they can't get DRM.
A bunch of things that could happen, but not things that have happened. Flash have decline in used and Netflix was created in time before EME. To claim that EME was a requisite for those events is a logical impossibility.
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I would suggest not underestimating Mozilla's market influence. It would be possible to create a browser that displays DRM content and ignores DRM. The only thing that content publishers could do is ban that browser. And then it would adapt to disguise itself as other browsers. DRM on the web can only happen if all of the major players (that is, browser publishers) agree to play along. I am very excited about this ne…
> It would be possible to create a browser that displays DRM content and ignores DRM. The DMCA makes this illegal. No browser vendor is going to take that risk. Maybe some anonymous developers will release a firefox fork or similar, but that's a big risk. Not to mention, most groups who pirate content tend to keep their methods secret and only release the content.
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TPB quality is usually very good, 1GB per hour is common and 4GB per hour is possible for high demand stuff. Plus you get a much better library. A fast internet connection makes the inconvenience of downloading vs. streaming go away.
1GB per hour isn't enough if you have a big screen (I use a 100" screen with projector). Not even Amazon encodes video well, they have particularly poor colour quantization that ends up filling the screen with blotchy seas of uniform colour; Netflix has the best encoding settings IME.
WRT movies:
WEBDL is usually 4-5GB
720p Bluray: 6GB
1080p: 8GB and up.
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> Firefox is DRM-free by default. It is now. But next year? In five years? And if it's gone, then what? > This is a paranoid slippery slope. Well, it's a slippery slope. And I do tend to plan for the worst. Plus a safety factor.
Open source software can never be completely "gone". The "OMG EVERYTHING WILL BE DRM" panic is not new. We've had widely available DRM back when Flash was super popular. And still, to this day, the only DRM'd thing is movies.
Maybe you meant to type 'the only thing I care about'.