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Will Google Oppose DRM On HTML5 Video?
An anonymous reader let us know that "Mozilla has committed to not implement DRM in Firefox for WebM HTML5 video even though it is theoretically possible. Microsoft has asked Google and the WebM community several other questions that still have not been answered, but this one seems more important: will Google commit to keeping WebM in Chrome DRM-free? Does our community think that is important for the open web and free software?"
Funny, I thought DRM was theoretically impossible. Something to do with Bob and Eve being the same person.
Flash will continue to persist on a large scale until such a time that HTML video is standardized and has acceptable DRM written into the standard. Until that happens, publishers simply aren't going to stop using Flash. Mozilla is shooting themselves in the foot, and Google will be doing so as well if they make the same decision.
DRM isn't evil, people. Publishers WANT you to be able to view their content, or they wouldn't be putting it online. They wouldn't implement some DRM scheme that would ruin your ability to watch it, or why even publish it? They are NOT, however, going to publish it without some sort of control mechanism. If Mozilla and Google don't realize this soon, then all the effort they've been putting into the HTML video standard is for nothing.
So Mozilla wants everyone to switch to WebM, but also thinks that a company like Hulu would be happy if people were able to download it's content by looking at the source code and seeing ??? Really? Come on now. There's standing up for a "free" internet and then also making sure that people can't easily steal web video content with a simple click. NO business in their right mind would agree to something like that.
Man, do you people think or do any research at all? Or do you just like trolling?
Mozilla Firefox (~30% of the browser market share) will never have support for H.264. Never.
Chrome (~11% of browser market share) no longer supports H.264.
H.264 cannot be the standard for HTML5 video because it is not royalty-free.
That's why WebM is a big deal.
I spent a long time opposed to DRM because of the lock in effect. Except that reality has pretty much rendered DRM as obsolete.
DRM does not and has not protected video game publishers.
DRM does not and has not prevented every significant song, movie, or other work from being easily, readily, and widely available on torrents.
DRM does not and has not generally resulted in an improved customer experience.
In a very real sense, it is frequently easier to use the pirate version of a game than the normal one. I love the GTA series on PC, and every single game I ever purchased I almost immediately installed the No-CD cracks. Yes, that's right. I bought all the games of GTA I ever played, and I cracked all of them just so I didn't have to dicker with the stupid DRM.
So, other than annoy the end users, what purpose does DRM serve?
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Right now the BBC serves H.264 streams via flash and it has pretty lousy performance (Flash) or pretty awesome performance (via the same stream in XBMC). If they want to shed Flash entirely and still serve a large proportion of the web then a limited amount of content protection is almost inevitable because the content producers (ie, not the BBC but the people who own some of the shows they broadcast) demand it.
Sure, ideally there would be no content protection at all (it really doesn't affect the free distribution of the content at all) but right now that is just not a reality.
I would love BBC iPlayer to be able to serve H.264 with HTML5 (it already does to iPhone user agent strings) since it would free me from the flash performance hog that makes HD streams stutter even on a powerful desktop machine. It won't happen if a sizeable portion of the browser market won't support it.
I'm only talking about iPlayer here, but it applies to many video services across the web - trying to force the DRM hand too early will just perpetuate Flash.
i keep having to point this out to people, time and time again: broadcasting and DRM are mutually exclusively incompatible. Free Software people recognise this, and anyone who fails to recognise it is just plain dumb. or is being paid to pretend to be dumb. let's do a simple maths demo. go get your calculator, and hit the following buttons: type in 1, then hit "-". then type 1000, then hit 1/x, then hit equals. then hit "power (x/y)" and then 1000 again. press equals, and you should have 0.36769 or thereabouts. now do the same, substituting 10,000, then 100,000, then 1,000,000 and keep doing that until you reach the limit of the digits of your calculator.
the number displayed on your screen is 1/e (2.7818281828) which should mean something to you.
now do this: instead of 0.999999 to the power of 1000000, try even something like 0.9999998 to the power of 1000000. you should notice something VERY quickly: it's almost zero. now try 0.9999991 to the power of 1000000 - you should notice something even more startling: it's almost 1.
this demonstrates something very very simple: that it doesn't MATTER how complex the DRM is (0.0000001 or 0.00000001 probability of one person breaking it) - sheer weight of numbers of people around the world WILL break it, period. that really is the end of the matter. the sooner that people recognise and accept this, the sooner we can get on with something more constructive to do with our time, such as watching the next episode of Stargate on the device of OUR choice.
>>>H.264... is extremely unfriendly to open source.
So then - how do open source programs like WinAmp, MP Classic, Miro, and VLC Player get away with using it? If they can do it, Chrome and Firefox should be able to do it too. (And Opera - since they are not open source at all.)
More importantly, how do I get the WebM video I just downloaded to work in my iPod? Or my TV? They only do Apple and MPEG codecs.
Information wants to be expensive AND wants to be free. So you have Value vs. Cheap distribution fighting each other.
DRM does not and has not protected video game publishers.
Yes it does. The digital restrictions management on video game consoles protects established video game publishers from competition from smaller indie developers. Console makers have a history of not granting licenses to micro-ISVs, and "homebrew" software relies on fragile jailbreaks that the console maker can and does fix with an update to the console's firmware.
I think the point he's making is that if there's no standards-based mechanism for delivering DRM-protected video, content providers will simply keep using Flash to do it, reducing interoperability and leading to inferior user experience.
Which is a fair point.
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Problem is, there can't really be a standards-based mechanism for delivering DRM anything, at least not in the sense of open standards on the Web.
Right now, if I stick to HTML5 and stuff like WebM, there is the theoretical possibility of me taking nothing but existing open source stuff, or even starting from scratch, and writing software that can consume that media. Pretty much any DRM which allowed me to do that wouldn't really be doing its job as DRM.
The better route is to suck it up and leave the DRM behind.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
H.264 isn't proprietary. It's an open standard. There are patents, which is a separate matter.
It's just sad that people cannot understand this basic, simple fact -- all they care about is "oh, can my X play Y"?
What's so sad about that? There are no nefarious pitfalls in using H.264, so why should people care beyond whether their X can play Y?
If a device jumped the gun and limited itself to a proprietary technology, that was its mistake, one that Google and Mozilla are trying to correct and push out with WebM. Make devices natively and in hardware decode WebM instead of H.264.
How is using H.264 a mistake? It's highly advanced and wildly successful. As for Google and Mozilla trying to "correct" this, they are not going to be able to "correct" many hundreds of millions of devices, as well as standards used by different industries and markets. To expect all of this to change, in favor of an inferior codec? Really?
Google and Mozilla are effectively marginalizing themselves and propping up Flash. All for an ideological stance that is hindering web progress and promoting an incompatible and inferior technology.
I hate DRM on purchased music/video downloads. But for streaming services it is absolutely necessary, and not to keep dedicated pirates from stealing content. For streaming services such as netflix it keeps honest users honest. Netflix allows 5 devices per account and you can only stream when you are paying the subscription fee. If there was no DRM, then there would be easily available programs that would let you download movies to your computer to be watched after canceling. And remove the 5 devices per account limit.
Honest users would do this, but with DRM they would not. It is in some ways similar to anti-shoplifing measures at retail stores. Sure a professional shoplifter can avoid this, but it provides enough security to keep the honest shoppers honest.
H.264 cannot be the standard for HTML5 video because it is not royalty-free.
That is not a true statement.
no, DRM makes things not searchable... there's no way Google wants that. Most of what's on YouTube doesn't NEED DRM...
The whole point of HTML5 video is so that "everyman" can use video services... for family videos... i.e all the crap that's on YouTube, Flickr, picassa, etc. HTML5 video isn't about SELLING videos... it's something that should have been done ten years ago... why should every browser not support a modern video format, like they support gif, png, jpeg? That's what everybody misses in this discussion. Everybody has their own DRM versions... I don't really see those going away, there's no reason the big guys like Apple, Microsoft, Adobe will have their own anyway...
The whole thing is bogus anyway... the big guys aren't going to give up their private DRM schemes anyway... all they're doing is stalling the process to fuck over the little people. Once Open HTML5 video hits and Google and Mozilla start implementing it then Apple and Microsoft will come along. Hell, if Adobe was clever they'd tack Vorbis and WebM into the next Flash and all the enterprise businesses would be none the wiser and keep using IE6!
Correct. My definition of "inferior" refers to the actual quality of the codec itself. Your definition is meta. It has absolutely no bearing on whether the codec, as a codec, is better or not.
What matters is whether the loss in quality, among many other benefits of H.264, is worth the gain "freedom" offered by WebM. For well over 99% of the people out there, it's not.