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anordal | 1 year ago

Yes, that line is important.

This has happened before. Remember the critique against Encrypted Media Extensions (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encrypted_Media_Extensions): Oh no, DRM in the browser! But remember that web video used to require Adobe Flash for the longest time, and even after a decade of HTML5 video, sites were still clinging onto Adobe Flash (and later also Microsoft Silverlight) for what turned out to be DRM purposes. At the time, these plagued proprietary blobs were not going anywhere. Except, after EME had widely supplanted this last holdout usecase, they were quietly allowed to die. The result is that we have much smaller-scoped proprietary blobs in the form of content delivery modules with a lot fewer bugs and portability issues.

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mort96|1 year ago

The situation with Flash and Silverlight was better than the situation currently is with EME. Before, you could implement a standard-compliant open source web browser, you just may not be able to view certain non-web embeds. Now, web browsers need permission from Google to view certain kinds of web content, and they can't be open source.

daveoc64|1 year ago

I agree with the other commenter.

The current situation is worse.

EME requires that the browser ship with a DRM library like Widevine.

Flash used an industry standard plugin model and could work in any browser.