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Comment by mythz | Hacker News Reader

This objection, does a solution not help make.

Sure it does. "Don't" is a perfectly reasonable solution here. It won't satisfy all parties, but not all parties are worth satisfying.

The future of everyone being able to view online video (e.g. Netflix/Hulu/BBC) without a plugin is not getting anywhere closer.

Sure looks like it's getting closer to me. The amount of content I can view without a plugin has absolutely exploded over the past few years. Sure, big Hollywood names aren't in there yet, but it's not like they're the only ones who make videos worth watching.

What you mean by "big Hollywood" the mainstream population refers to as "TV" and "Movies". None of which we're able to watch without a plugin. I do all my TV watching online (95% on Netflix/Hulu), even most of the videos I watch on YouTube require flash, despite being opt-in to using the HTML5 video player.

Your statement was "closer". Even if the video watchable without plugins is only 1% of the total, your statement is still wrong if it was e.g. 0.1% a few years ago.

Regarding YouTube, I do most of my YouTubing on iOS devices, and it's very rare to find a video that doesn't work, so the non-plugin support is good. Why it doesn't work in your browser, I couldn't say, but at this point I suspect it's more about your setup than YouTube not supporting it at all.

This could not possibly be further from the truth.

EME is just as much of a platform specific closed source plugin as flash or silverlight.

You do realize that the proposed HTML5 DRM specification has nothing to do with being able to view DRM-protected videos without plugins, as it's mostly centered around specifying a platform for plugins, do you?

The W3C DRM plug-in standard requires proprietary plugins to work.

So you're right.

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