Re: Response from Director to formal objection "Turn off EME by default and activate only with express permission from user"

On Wed, Apr 12, 2017 at 11:35 AM, Jean-Yves Avenard <jya@mozilla.com> wrote:

> On Wed, Apr 12, 2017 at 12:39 AM, Mark Watson <watsonm@netflix.com> wrote:
> > Just for for the record, as one of the organizations driving this effort,
> > our rationale for this has nothing at all to do with the DMCA and
> everything
> > to do with improving the user experience: specifically plug-in free
> access
> > to our service and access to hardware decoders to improve battery life
> and
> > video quality. Improvement in security and privacy vs Silverlight is
> also a
> > benefit. That's really it: hardware decoders enabling 4K and soon HDR
> are a
> > big deal for us. This has been a lot of work for a technical refactoring
> > exercise.
>
> You got me curious...
>
> This may be off-topic but now that you've mentioned it.
> How is EME helping with the use of hardware decoder, 4K and/or support for
> HDR?
>
> The requirements for secure path after all limit Chrome and Firefox to
> a maximum of 720p resolution. And hardware decoding capabilities had
> to be removed precisely because of EME and vendor requirements.
>

​If the secure path is provided by the OS, then in some cases it can
include hardware decoding which becomes especially important for 4K. Sorry,
I probably shouldn't have included HDR here - it's just that most HDR
content is available in 4K at the moment, but of course you can have lower
resolution and still get the benefit of HDR.

...Mark



>
> Note that I do not wish to participate in the current debate about
> EME. It would be rather inappropriate for me to do so.
>