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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."
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.
Unless I'm missing something, there is no need for any additional code in Firefox or any other browser. Your browser just executes the ORBX.js javascript.
It was already bloated before it went the OS route.
"Good, Fast, Cheap: Pick any two" -- RFC 1925
They INVENTED JavaScript and are single handedly responsible for us not being locked into MS's 'vision' of the net - without costing you a cent. Give them a break.
It's a cross platform OS, what's not to like. SQUEE at the first part of the summary, AWW at the second part. What a letdown.
Actually Netscape invented JavaScript. Mozilla got the code from Netscape (but did a more or less complete rewrite anyway because that code was too messy), but they are a different organization.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Firefox is becoming the Emacs of web browsers.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Is that good or bad?
You are welcome on my lawn.
They INVENTED JavaScript and are single handedly responsible for us not being locked into MS's 'vision' of the net - without costing you a cent. Give them a break.
Except for the fact that every day I encounter websites that do not display properly and/or are non-functional in any browser other than Internet Explorer.. Despite the popularity of Firefox and Chrome, we are still very much locked into "Microsoft's vision of the net"
As for giving them a break, I don't think so. After using Firefox for several years, my wife, the typical clueless nontechnical user, switched to Internet Explorer. Partly because it "worked better" on the websites she visits most often and partly because she updated to the latest release of Firefox and suddenly found that Firefox was "broken" -- some features she liked and used frequently were missing.
Yes, you are completely missing the point.
By now, the whole damn OS API is implemented in browsers. But slower. And shittier. And crippled.
s/browser/shell/g; s/tab bar/task bar/g; and you're done. In fact they already went that far, and called it ChromeOS!
In fact they went even further: The browser is not the new OS, but the new machine .
Don't believe they went too far? Then feast your eyes at THIS: http://jslinux.org/
Yes, that's right! The actual Linux kernel... running on an actual virtual CPU... actually implemented in JavaScript inside your browser!
If you don't think this path is fucked-up, you're fucked-up.
So, that means chrome is vim, and IE is notepad... sounds about right.
I kinda wish I had mod points right now
Of all the sites I use on the web, the only ones Im locked to IE are my email app thru my business and the CRM system. (IE 10 - no legacy need) other than that. I havent needed IE for anything else in years now. I am not saying there are not times where your wifes situation are recomended. However in my case, i took everyone I know off IE close a decade ago now and have not heard any complaints.
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Except for the fact that every day I encounter websites that do not display properly and/or are non-functional in any browser other than Internet Explorer.. Despite the popularity of Firefox and Chrome, we are still very much locked into "Microsoft's vision of the net"
I am a professional software developer for a fortune 500 company, all the the projects I've been on for the past 14 years have been web related in one way or another.
If you were any fuller of shit you would simply explode.
XML is a known as a key material required to create SMD: Software of Mass Destruction
Good. Unless you're a vi user.
Except for the fact that every day I encounter websites that do not display properly and/or are non-functional in any browser other than Internet Explorer.. Despite the popularity of Firefox and Chrome, we are still very much locked into "Microsoft's vision of the net"
I am a professional software developer for a fortune 500 company, all the the projects I've been on for the past 14 years have been web related in one way or another.
If you were any fuller of shit you would simply explode.
I see . . . and so I am trapped in some sort of alternate universe and all those websites I have encountered which do not function properly in Firefox, but work just fine in Internet Explorer don't actually exist.
You sir, are the one who is full of shit.
Actually Netscape invented JavaScript. Mozilla got the code from Netscape (but did a more or less complete rewrite anyway
Actually actually the JavaScript interpreter is one of the few components from Netscape that they didn't rewrite (although it has of course had plenty of development over the years since then).
Yes, you are completely missing the point.
By now, the whole damn OS API is implemented in browsers. But slower. And shittier. And crippled.
s/browser/shell/g; s/tab bar/task bar/g; and you're done. In fact they already went that far, and called it ChromeOS!
In fact they went even further: The browser is not the new OS, but the new machine .
Don't believe they went too far? Then feast your eyes at THIS: http://jslinux.org/
Yes, that's right! The actual Linux kernel... running on an actual virtual CPU... actually implemented in JavaScript inside your browser!
If you don't think this path is fucked-up, you're fucked-up.
Irrelevant examples are irrelevant.
You use your Web browser to go to a web page and there's a video. How do you play it? Your browser uses some sort of plugin. This is not an example of the "Inner Platform Effect" but simply the most efficient and straight forward way to do it. As for the other examples, yes they are stupid, but irrelevant. All browsers contain a Javascript interpreter and ORBX.js is just another Javascript file. In fact, this *reduces* browser bloat by eliminating the need for a video plugin and instead, just using the Javascript interpreter that already exists in the browser.
I am a professional software developer for a fortune 500 company, all the the projects I've been on for the past 14 years have been web related in one way or another.
Good, then you'll be able to present a reasonable and well-put argument to refu--
If you were any fuller of shit you would simply explode.
Aw.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
I see . . . and so I am trapped in some sort of alternate universe and all those websites I have encountered which do not function properly in Firefox, but work just fine in Internet Explorer don't actually exist.
GP's piss-poor arguing skills aside, I haven't seen a not-functional-in-Firefox website in years. What's the most egregious example you can provide?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Yes, the inner platform effect is an anti-pattern, and browsers do represent an example of it to a large extent. But that's not actually a bad thing.
Browsers have become a major way to distribute/run applications and in many ways they are significantly better than other methods. Particularly, web apps are (for the most part) cross-platform, even to obscure platforms. Other pluses are that they are very easy to make accessible, easy for the end-user (or at least third-party extensions) to customize, easy to write, and auto-updating.
The slow evolution of HTML into an application platform is certainly weird, the blending of the document viewer with an application platform has issues, and the legacy in the technology isn't great, but it's still the best chance for a cross-platform application target.
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...
From wikipedia...
"Eich is best known for his work on Netscape and Mozilla. He started work at Netscape Communications Corporation in April 1995, working on JavaScript (originally called Mocha, then called LiveScript) for the Netscape Navigator web browser. He then helped found mozilla.org in early 1998, serving as chief architect."
Since Eich both invented the language and helped found Mozilla, it seems like a pretty fair statement to say they (the Firefox/Moziilla team led by Eich) invented javascript.
Also note that he actually INVENTED javascript. He didn't just write an implementation of it. He is the original creator of the language itself.
thats what thumbdrives are foe. dont even need to load IE for firefox or chrome downloads, load the version on the tumbdrive and it auto updates to the new version!
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
I almost never use IE and I haven't found a site in years that required it to work well (barring some internal corporate crap).
I do agree that Firefox went through a rough spot by jumping into a rapid release cycle without preparing enough for the challenges that brings. However, they seem to have gotten things working pretty smoothly now. There are frequent updates, but I no longer see things breaking like I did when they first started it.
It simply wasn't worth the effort. There's just no point in arguing with someone who's making it all up.
XML is a known as a key material required to create SMD: Software of Mass Destruction
I see . . . and so I am trapped in some sort of alternate universe and all those websites I have encountered which do not function properly in Firefox, but work just fine in Internet Explorer don't actually exist.
GP's piss-poor arguing skills aside, I haven't seen a not-functional-in-Firefox website in years. What's the most egregious example you can provide?
You won't get an answer, those the vast majority of websites actually work better with Chrome and Firefox then they do with IE. Unless of course they were meant to only work with IE, which means that they were not really meant for public use anyway.
XML is a known as a key material required to create SMD: Software of Mass Destruction
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.
Check your timezone settings - you seem to have left them about ten years into the past.
Good points, but another key attribute of applications executed in the browser is security. The browser has a consistant security footprint that I trust a lot more than I trust new applications. I may visit hundreds of pages in a day from vendors I have never heard of before, but I'd never be comfortable installing hundreds of applications even if they were more efficient for the same tasks. Most of the time, I trust my browser not to do something bad to my computer regardless of the content and am placing my trust in a single application. Doing the same thing with an equivilant number of applications would be terrifying.
This is the single thing that makes Linux better than any other system for me. I can get practically all the software I want by investigating and trusting a single entity rather than dealing with dozens of different relationships with different levels of investigation and unpredictable levels of trustworthiness. If a browser based system can offer the same wealth of applications at a reasonable speed without serious security issues, then I find the idea quite interesting.
B) Eliminate all the stupid users. This is frowned upon by society.
I left Firefox too for a long time too.
I am typing this on Firefox 17 ESR because I do not like change that often when it breaks things, but it is much better thant Firefox 4. Versions 4 through 8 were really terrible and I do not blame his wife for switching.
My exwife used IE 6 right until IE 7 came out. I loaded up Firefox 2 and she was shocked how much better it was. She is not a loyalist and thinks IE is crap. Point being is that browsers and things change. Some people use Firefox out of habbit like some IE users now and wont change. Some like me use the best tool.
2 years ago IE 9 was the best browser. Secure, supported decent HTML 5, quick etc. Then Chrome was the better one. Now I find Firefox improving as it is no longer a bloated pig that breaks ever release and is OK. Once someone leaves due to performance the image is tarnished just like yours is with IE. Very hard to get people to switch back.
http://saveie6.com/
Care to share the sites?
I remember those dark days but besides the British ministry of health and welfare that requires its applicants to use IE 6 I no of none and I mean none on the net. Work it is different as 85% of corps love crappy ancient software because they can standardize on it and never spend money to change something unless the accountants see a way it can boost the shareprice.
Even at my work my coworkers use IE 9 and it works with 90% of our portals. Chrome bitches about our portal system with a warning box but it still renders fine. We have old stuff in the office too. Thank God for Firefox and Chrome.
With tablets going into the workplace I envision the following decade will be about ripping out the ancient proprietry stuff like MS and moving them into virtualization servers accissible by a webkit browser and open HTML 5 apps by decades end. Microsoft is not there yet with Windows 8 and the surface, but I can imagine that will change rapidly as apps that run on the big 3 will come out and Windows 9 will be very much improved and can run tablet style and cloud enabled so you can get rid of your while I.T. department and go cloud.
http://saveie6.com/
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.
Firefox even disregards the hosts file.
Sure, you can disable it, but why would it be ignioring it in the first place? Why would it have DNS cache and looking up things itself. Probably just so it is faster on paper then some other browser. Well, with those miliseconds gained, please deduct the hours I spend trying to figure out what the fuck went wrong when I could not get to localhost or any machine that was in my hosts file.
So, please stop adding shit to the browser that should belong in add-ons (if somebody wants them) or at least make it easier then to go through the about:config. Why not spend some time on making those settings more accessible?
Oh, a search shows that all browsers do this. Probably so we don't use mvps or other similar sites.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
The problem with what you do is compare the browsers with what is out there. What you should do is compare it with what you want and then you start to realize that Firefox is a lot of crap. The Firefox developers decide too often what I should instead of what I want.
I run several different DISPLAYS, so I am forced to use different profiles, otherwise the second one does not start. I have to look for a workaround so it correctly uses my hosts file.
My machine does DNS, so there is NO need to do it yourself. Almost any program can be opened twice. (When you run firefox a second time, you just open a new window) Yet with Firefox this is not possible. Not on a second DISPLAY.
Sure there will be some excuses as to why, but I am not interested in excuses or explanations. I am interested in results.
1) Throw out everything DNS related
2) Let me run a second instance (not a second window) of the program
There are many more issues, yet I wanted to keep it relative short.
When comparing it to other browsers, it is the least crap and apparently that is a high enough standard nowadays. Woot for mediocrity.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Haven't noticed it. I use hosts files constantly to test that a site works correctly on a name based virtual server before changing the DNS and it has always worked. Granted - i use FF on OSX and you are probably talking about Win.
Yes 'just' execute ORBX.js. And if ORBX.js will work as well the the pdf.js Firefox has started to use instead of arcoread, I will soon have to use another browser to see content besides HTML more than half of the time.
Javascript is slow and insecure. There is a reason I use noscript. I don't want every application re-implemented in Javascript and the browser using it instead of native applications just because it is possible.
I think the CAPS are meaningful. Parent is talking about the X11 "DISPLAY" environment variable. If you have more monitors than you can connect to one video card, you can either have hardware acceleration or all physical screens on the same DISPLAY. Or at least that was the case the last time I looked into it.
Use Firefox sync to keep your profiles the same?
If we go by memory footprint, Chrome is Eclipse.
...another key attribute of applications executed in the browser is security. The browser has a consistant security footprint that I trust a lot more than I trust new applications.
I imagine that if we did statistics today on this, not only does much more malware exist in stuffs executed by the browser than from applications that they install, they are also much more likely to get malware from the browser vector than any other vector (because of compromised sites and random surfing).
Sure much of the malware payload isn't pure javascript, but many vulnerablities start there (e.g., xss, csrf, etc) and in the implementations of the "sandboxes" that browsers use to run the malware^H applets/plugins (like java).
I think you trust is misplaced in the current environment.
Please do not conflate this discussion with a digression into the merits and demerits of walled gardens.
Thank you.
Kid-proof tablet..
You use your Web browser to go to a web page and there's a video. How do you play it? Your browser uses some sort of plugin. This is not an example of the "Inner Platform Effect" but simply the most efficient and straight forward way to do it.
I am perfectly aware that for some people (most people?) playing the video embedded in the browser might be the most straightforward way of playing it. For some it might be somewhat challenging finding the "save as" option in the context menu, and deciding a path that later they have to find again, but...
Embedded video players are the worst video player ever. Ever. There, I said it.
I'm following a class in Coursera, and the first thing I do is save the videos as local files and play them with VLC. When I press the spacebar to jot down something, sometimes the video pauses, sometimes an invisible blank character is written in a text field of the page, or some link that has the focus is accidentally clicked.
If the embedded player in the browser can't get right something as simple as toggling the playback, don't get me started on the convenient shortcuts that a video player has to play faster and slower, or going some seconds/minutes/hours forward and backward.
Browsers are nice, and some cool fancy webpages can be done combinating transitions, text, images, and yes, video, but attempting that a browser is going to be a good video player is never going to happen.
I understand why you'd want to avoid that, but a walled garden is really where you can't choose to install software outside the specific vendor and that's obviously not what I was talking about. Considering the positive and negative aspects of security for the system in TFA is relevant isn't it?
B) Eliminate all the stupid users. This is frowned upon by society.
I wouldn't disagree that more malware exists in web content, but then I'm not suggesting the ecosystem is perfectly safe. The security difference between installing an independant application for each thing and running them all through a single application is significant.
Is IE10 safe? Is FF safe? Is Opera safe? Is Safari safe? Is Chrome safe? Is Flash safe? Is Silverlight safe? Is Java safe?
You can have a discussion about the strengths and weaknesses of the security models of each. You can say "No" to every one or mix your answers but the point is that you can make the decision. If you were to have to do the same thing for all the applications you can run in them, you'd never be able to complete the process.
B) Eliminate all the stupid users. This is frowned upon by society.
No.
Kid-proof tablet..
So soon Firefox will have everything, except a decent web browser?
Just install the Lynx Addon
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
The browser has a consistant security footprint that I trust a lot more than I trust new applications.
What do you mean by a 'consistent security footprint'?
It doesn't ignore it on Windows either. And I'd recommend testing your sites in Windows FF as well, they're not always quite the same.
I haven't looked at the others, but target.com seems fine at first glance on Safari 6.
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.
But in the ACTUAL context of this article, yes, it should clearly be "encoder".
MOST EFFICIENT? Implementing the whole H.264 decoder in Javascript is going to make Flash video playback look like a perfect implementation in comparison CPU usage-wise.
The *most efficient* way to do it is to use hardware decoding from a GPU (or CPU like Intel Sandy Bridge, etc), which is what most modern computers have been capable of for years anyway. But even MMX/SSE SIMD optimizations (which I would assume are NOT going to be available to "pure" Javascript) would be several times more efficient than even a decent Javascript JIT...
That I can't disagree with (well, not literally, of course :)
It's so ironic that Javascript and HTML/XML form not only the basis of the modern WWW but are GAINING in popularity for "desktop" applications, when they comprise some of the most ridiculous and/or inefficient code and data descriptions someone could come up with. And even more ironic when people use XML as a data format with Javascript, since most Javascript XML parsers are insanely horrible in terms of performance (hence JSON was born). Really, the only reason they are still used is that CPU and RAM specs have so far outpaced software development that no one seems to give a shit any more about performance...
Except for the fact that every day I encounter websites that do not display properly and/or are non-functional in any browser other than Internet Explorer.. Despite the popularity of Firefox and Chrome, we are still very much locked into "Microsoft's vision of the net"
Ok, that is just absurd. With the latest generation of browsers I almost never see any compatibility issues. I use Chrome and Safari for Microsoft Outlook Web Access and they work perfectly for me. So Microsoft is locking people in when their flagship web-based (and very complex) product works fine on all browsers?
i don't make the sites, i just set up servers for them