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ORBX.js: 1080p DRM-Free Video and Cloud Gaming Entirely In JavaScript
An anonymous reader writes "According to Brendan Eich, CTO of Mozilla and the creator of JavaScript, ORBX.js can decode 1080p HD video and support low latency remote graphics entirely in JavaScript, offering a pure JavaScript alternative to VP8/H.264 native code extensions for HTML5 video. Watermarking is used during encoding process for protected IP, rather than relying on local DRM in the browser. Mozilla is also working with OTOY, Autodesk and USC ICT to support emerging technologies through ORBX.js — including light field displays and VR headsets like the Oculus Rift."
Writes reader mikejuk: "The problem with all of this is that orbix.js is just a decoder and there is little information on the coder end of the deal. It could be that OTOY will profit big time from coding videos and watermarking them while serving virtual desktops from their GPU cloud. The decoder might be open source but the situation about the rest of the technology is unclear. In the meantime we have to trust that Mozilla, and Brendan Eich in particular, are not being sold a utopian view of a slightly dystopian future."
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Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Watermarking, not DRM. This could be huge. OTOY’s GPU cloud approach enables individually watermarking every intra-frame, and according to some of its Hollywood supporters including Ari Emanuel, this may be enough to eliminate the need for DRM.
LOL.
"Hollywood Supporters". Those two words alone are enough to make this something to avoid.
Please stop turning Firefox into a OS. I want my browser back.
just what the world needed another codec...
Someone dropped the ball big time on the name. There is already a software company called ORBX...they make flight sim addons.
TODO: Something witty here...
Investors in high technology are almost always idiots with no education in the fundamentals. Rather than take an informed approach based on carefully gained knowledge, they try to 'smell' success and are very vulnerable to signs of enthusiasm from industry 'figures' like 'Eich'.
It is child's play to create video decoders that SEEM to work great on very carefully chosen video material. An analogue would be the early colour ink-jet printers that seemed to create excellent photos in the store, when the manufacture provided JPG files were printed, but were actually lousy when it came to the types of photos real users wish to create hard-copies from.
X264 is the planet's best H264 encoder by a massive margin, and is free and open-source. The development team is excellent at examining the quality of competing encoders, and showing the reality of their performance. So, I just know Brendan Eich has provided some of the x264 team with access to the OTOY encoder/decoder, so that people we trust can verify the claims. WAIT... I am certain Eich has most certainly NOT done any such thing.
This is a 'pump and dump' con project at its most crude. Some well respected (snigger snigger) industry figure talks up a tech he 'claims' to be independent of (yeah, no chance he owns shares in OTOY- no chance at all). How many times does this need to play out. Magic compression schemes for file storage. Magic holographic storage disks. Magic new battery technologies.
Know what all these cons have in common? Wishful thinking by badly educated 'nerds' leading to people actually believing such publicity. The very best example of this was with the worst and most hopeless semiconductor project of all time, Intel's Larrabee GPU, on which Intel spent more than AMD's and Nvidia's total GPU R+D combined, and yet the very design of the Larrabee meant it could only have ever have been the monumental failure that it was. Intel's (very very expensive) engineers didn't know the first thing about proper GPU hardware, and Mozilla's chumps have even less knowledge of usable video encoders.
The Mozilla company is so technically incompetent, it doesn't even know how to assign a separate thread to the standard GUI elements of a window, so that Firefox can still stay 'responsive' while other code paths are busy processing application code. So incompetent, that they do not know how to prevent a 'busy' Firefox from stealing the entire resources of the host computer. So incompetent that they've never even heard of 'memory management'. Believe me, looking to these clowns for 'breakthroughs' in any area of the industry is just hilarious.
How do you download a movie? How do you know you will still be able to play it in the future? How do you encode? As Brendan Eich says himself, "encoders are still mystery-meat". Well I'm not eating it unless they tell me what it is.
Watermarking is worse than DRM. Another person has already spelled out how to defang it - compare multiple copies and fuzz the parts that are different.
But the huge downside for the vast majority of regular joes is that it makes all of the customers responsible for "protecting" the videos they watch. If anyone hacks them or snoops the download stream or even infiltrates the server transmitting the video and releases their copy into the wild, that innocent viewer is now implicitly responsible for that piracy. It becomes a guilty until proven innocent situation.
No way am I going to watch a streaming movie, much less pay for it, if it means I have to now worry about the ultra-litigious MAFIAA coming after me with multi-million dollar copyright infringement lawsuits because I didn't know my PC was infected with a virus designed to pilfer the videos I watch.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
To one that can not only decode h264 in software, but in a language that -- despite ludicrous amounts of effort having been wasted on speeding it up -- is still ridiculously inefficient compared even to the optimised native code h264 decoders that are too slow to handle HD video on my primary computer.
Which is why we have hardware decoders. Which work very nicely for playing back HD video without my having to waste money on a new computer to replace this one that works perfectly well and consumes significantly less power than the kind of monstrosity that the Firefox developers are apparently using.
Seriously, what is with this obsession with reimplementing everything with a technology that is basically the worst possible choice for 99% of the things it is now being abused to do?
I started a project on this nearly 2 years ago within my company to make use of WebCL as a means for providing real-time video coding and decoding. The problem I faced more than anything else at the time was audio synchronization. I also made a bunch of noise about this with regards to the stupid video tag being codec dependent. My implementation however was purely H.264 at the time.
I'm glad to see someone taking this serious. This has many options including providing support for DRM for vendors who want to use it without forcing DRM into the W3C standards. As I said... about damn time.
this gon fukk up so hard as soon as you have two videos playing simultaneously lolo