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Comment by chaz72 | Hacker News Reader

As far as I can tell, as long as the DRM is in Flash or Silverlight then some people still hope that "getting rid of DRM" is a winnable fight.

I doubt that's true, myself. It'd be nice, but I don't see it happening.

My online video watching is primarily Netflix with a healthy dose of Hulu Plus, iTunes, and Youtube. Not much of it is available without DRM. That is not a technical choice. That is a commercial choice being made by the people who own the content. Since I'm not going to steal it from them, their choice matters more than mine.

So DRM stays. Might as well have it built-in, more efficient and more secure.

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I can CHOOSE to not use Silverlight or Flash. I know it seems like an RMS way of thinking, but with plugins I can choose not to use them.

Now, I have no choice. And the EME spec branches out beyond HTML5 Video. If additional working groups dictate it, soon you won't even be able to view page source or take content.

    >Now, I have no choice.

If you choose not to watch Netflix, with or without a plugin, isn't that making a choice as to whether to tolerate DRM'd content?

I'm pretty sure you can disable the proprietary DRM blobs on your browser.

You will miss out on a lot of DRM'd content out there, but you can still choose.

You are presumably already choosing not to use Netflix now. I'm not. I'm choosing to use Netflix now, and I want the more secure, more efficient built-in method.

That said, I would like a more secure, more efficient built-in method for any non-DRM video source that chooses to be distributed openly too!

How on earth having an unknown, unsecure, unreviewed binary blob running on your computer be "the more secure method"? Compared to what? But having a blob in the browser running in a sea of proprietary code (MacOS), I don't think it makes such a big difference.

"a more secure ... non-DRM video source" - more secure compared to what? What does security means to you? If you are going to watch non-DRMed video, it's already as secure as it can get, all you need for the efficiency part is better codecs, think of VP9, or Daala.

More secure than Flash or Silverlight which are what I personally use today. VP9 and Daala are not, as far as I know, available for me to use when watching netflix.

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