Tweet
External players and DRM
Windows Media Center is a lousy video player. Some time ago I tested both pre and post Prescott Pentium 4's with my videos to see how they would play for users of really old machines. I knew the same machines (BOTH of them) could play 720P video on an optimized Linux setup in MPV, but the older one could not play smaller 540p video in browser at all. Guess what? On the Windows machines performance in Windows Media Center was no better than in the browser, meaning a Windows user unable to install mplayer/mpv needs a 2.8 GHZ hyperthreaded Prescott system or better to play my H264 540x960 resolution videos in browser. The crew I work with agreed that few with older machines than that would be expecting in-browser video playback to work well, so not to reduce resolution to 360p to target those machines at the expense of all newer ones. Phones played the videos fine due to HW acceleration.
From that test it becomes clear that if the main platform target of FF and Chrome is Windows users with only Windows Media Center installed, they will gain little or nothing from linking to the available external player. That random Winbox doesn't have MPV on it, and they can do just as well with their own assets as by leveraging Windows Media Center or just "default system video player." Only Linux and possibly Mac users (based on BSD) would benefit without also installing a better default video player.
It's possible to support Flash DRM with significant effort on Linux systems, requires HAL to be installed last I saw. I removed Hal (which I was no longer using) when I heard about that, as a quick way to ensure that unused DRM binaries would not function on my system. Since I do not use "premium content," functional web DRM would just be more attack surface on my setup. To me, the lack of support for this in HTML5 without an external DRM binary is a plus, not a minus. Firefox is getting a little harder to secure against phoning home and installing unused extras, but you can still keep things out by hunting down and deleting URL's in about:config. This is how I disabled GMPInstallManager connections I found thanks to debugging logs enabled in an ubuntu build of FF33. That was because I don't want Mozilla or anyone else to have a database of every connection I ever make from random wifi hotspots. Same goes for companies running license servers that would be used with DRM content. You can't watch TV on my computers and no, I do not care.
There are too many websites these days that host video but use complex code to interfere with playback on adblocking and tracking-secured browsers. I will never post to them and do not watch their videos unless I can bypass their crap. I hope future browsers make the existance of such sites as difficult as possible. What happens when SeeBS News requires a default browser useer to manually enable a half-dozen trackers and ad sites to play their propaganda?
Originally posted by My8th
View Post
From that test it becomes clear that if the main platform target of FF and Chrome is Windows users with only Windows Media Center installed, they will gain little or nothing from linking to the available external player. That random Winbox doesn't have MPV on it, and they can do just as well with their own assets as by leveraging Windows Media Center or just "default system video player." Only Linux and possibly Mac users (based on BSD) would benefit without also installing a better default video player.
It's possible to support Flash DRM with significant effort on Linux systems, requires HAL to be installed last I saw. I removed Hal (which I was no longer using) when I heard about that, as a quick way to ensure that unused DRM binaries would not function on my system. Since I do not use "premium content," functional web DRM would just be more attack surface on my setup. To me, the lack of support for this in HTML5 without an external DRM binary is a plus, not a minus. Firefox is getting a little harder to secure against phoning home and installing unused extras, but you can still keep things out by hunting down and deleting URL's in about:config. This is how I disabled GMPInstallManager connections I found thanks to debugging logs enabled in an ubuntu build of FF33. That was because I don't want Mozilla or anyone else to have a database of every connection I ever make from random wifi hotspots. Same goes for companies running license servers that would be used with DRM content. You can't watch TV on my computers and no, I do not care.
There are too many websites these days that host video but use complex code to interfere with playback on adblocking and tracking-secured browsers. I will never post to them and do not watch their videos unless I can bypass their crap. I hope future browsers make the existance of such sites as difficult as possible. What happens when SeeBS News requires a default browser useer to manually enable a half-dozen trackers and ad sites to play their propaganda?
Comment