Ubuntu To Investigate Digital Rights Management

With Ubuntu preparing itself to land on tablets, smart-phones, and other consumer devices, Canonical is beginning to look at ways to support multimedia content protected by Digital Rights Management.

For Ubuntu to be successful on mainstream consumer electronic devices, it will need to be capable of protecting DRM-protected content. Yesterday during the virtual Ubuntu Developer Summit was a session on hardware-accelerated video decode and rendering support. This video decode/rendering session was mostly about Ubuntu Touch and providing full hardware support for video playback. Right now Ubuntu Touch is using libhybris through Android Media Player while eventually they want to support GStreamer. Since GStreamer is currently used on the Ubuntu desktop, they want GStreamer on the Android-based Ubuntu Touch.

During the session, the matter of DRM (Digital Rights Management, not the common Linux DRM of the Direct Rendering Manager) was brought up. The developers still need to investigate what DRM possibilities currently exist for Android, whether the Android DRM support is in the Java layer or not, how is license handling done and DRM keys managed, and DRM use-cases.

The session ultimately resulted in work items of deciding upon DRM requirements and what DRM schemes they want to support right away.

Embedded below is the Google+ Hangout of the session.