Arbitrary codecs and encryption schemes, was: Re: Encrypted Media proposal (was RE: ISSUE-179: av_param - Chairs Solicit Alternate Proposals or Counter-Proposals)

On 2/24/2012 12:17 AM, Henri Sivonen wrote:
>> >  The second sentence, no: we describe how to*communicate with*  the
>> >  protection system, but we do not describe a protection system.
> Failing to describe the protection system means that your spec fails
> to deliver the benefits of interoperability and level playing field
> for competition that detailed Royalty-Free specs deliver when they
> fully describe the system. That is to say that your proposal fails to
> satisfy a major reason for being for W3C specs.

<video> and <audio> do not specify any interoperability. Canvas is the 
last element to require a format (PNG).
I can't get FLAC nor ALAC past the working group for <audio>, let alone 
broaching the issue of video.
The PNG precedent is a fluke. It won't repeat with <audio>.

<video> and <audio> are intentionally about arbitrary codecs, and not 
pushing vendors to have any interop.

Whatever fault the group would like to point out with the Encrypted 
Media proposal, I don't think it's fair to  demand more from the 
proposal than is demanded from the base tags.
Louis CK did use some DRM, at a cost of several thousand, to tens of 
thousands of dollars in added bandwidth costs.
It just wasn't an "encrypted stream". It was a time sensitive 
"encrypted" URL.

Short of hardware encryption, an encrypted stream is no more special 
than an arbitrary codec.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeCSS

Trusted computing does make sense.
http://theinvisiblethings.blogspot.com/2009/10/evil-maid-goes-after-truecrypt.html

If vendors want to play cat-and-mouse beyond Blu-ray, well they're going 
to do it.. that's a shame.

They're sure making things hard on themselves in the meantime. They can 
easily manage encrypted and obfuscated streams through ArrayBuffer.
They don't need to setup false cases and barriers to handle that sort of 
thing.

Netflix needs Silverlight for "robust" protection like Hulu needs Flash 
for "robust" protection.
They need the quotation marks for their attorneys.

Meanwhile, all the folk traveling and worried about trusted computing, 
well they do need real, robust protection.
Encrypted media streams are means to enable robust protection beyond 
what can be accomplished with current APIs.

There's no way around that one. If the WG wants to keep this battle 
going until YouTube finally gets movies onto WebM + HTML5, that's just 
politics. I understand that people feel it's a moral duty to do so. I 
think we have a moral duty to consider the better side of this 
technology: protecting the privacy of people.

-Charles