Re: EME and proprietary plug-ins

n Wed, Feb 13, 2013 at 2:31 PM, Robert O'Callahan <robert@ocallahan.org>wrote:

> On Thu, Feb 14, 2013 at 6:58 AM, Chris Wilson <cwilso@google.com> wrote:
>
>> I was responding to the thread of reasoning I thought I heard you making
>> that said "EME would make the playing field less level than it already can
>> be (and is) with Flash/SL."  I don't believe that to be true, other than
>> browsers that don't support EME.
>>
>
> Apart from licensing, there is the technical issue that Henri raised which
> has been ignored so far in this thread: there is a publicly defined API,
> NPAPI, through which any browser can integrate Flash and Silverlight. There
> is no such thing currently proposed for EME CDMs, so for that reason alone,
> NPAPI plugins provide a more level playing field across browsers than EME
> proposes to.
>

Heh.  1) If you take on supporting NPAPI. 2) Again, that's presuming that
the content playing uses of Flash/SL never browser-test, which isn't true.

NPAPI could be used for this purpose, I suppose.  But honestly - Flash, at
least, is a dog; no, the inevitable product of a dog (I *like* my dog.  Too
bad she piddles on the floor so much.  Hey, the analogy works!)
 Flash-ripping aside, my point is that NPAPI was, to my knowledge,
developed as a content-delivery format.  The fact that, through a beastly
plugin that just happens to be installed on an ever-decreasing number of
desktop-only systems, be used most of the time to view "protected" content,
isn't a real answer to the problem, certainly not going forward.  Perhaps
your answer is "don't protect, and then it all just works" - which is fine.

Again, my opinions.  I don't claim to know the perfect answers here, but I
do have a pretty good idea that Flash/SL are a hacked and imperfect
solution at best, and they are degrading over time.

-C