Re: Is EME supposed to work with open source browsers in practice?

Holyfsm,

An improbable honour indeed...

I don't think anyone has suggested that it will be easier for a browser to
integrate with a CDM through EME than to support NPAPI plugins. Mozilla and
others have pointed this out as a disadvantage that EME has over NPAPI.
However, I don't think anyone has used this as an argument against the move
to deprecate NPAPI. EME is presently the only path we have to deprecation
of NPAPI without losing support for applications that require DRM.

A key difference between the EME model and NPAPI is that browsers are
expected to explicitly integrate with particular CDMs, rather that provide
support for arbitrary downloaded code. This is what enables UAs to offer
improved privacy and security guarantees compared to the NPAPI model, but
it does come with some work for the User Agent implementors.

As they did with NPAPI, it would be possible for the browser implementors
to come together and agree on a common API for CDMs, which would simplify
the integration somewhat. The work Mozilla is doing with mutual validation
between CDM and open-source sandbox is certainly interesting.

...Mark





On Mon, Dec 8, 2014 at 12:08 PM, H <holyfsm0@gmail.com> wrote:

> Assuming that a particular browser does implement the EME
> specification, is it expected that real-world CDMs will work with it?
>
> It has been suggested that this spec will improve the situation of
> open source browsers by allowing them to integrate with the small
> proprietary DRM modules easier than it currently does (with e.g.
> flash, silverlight, etc.). This sounds great in theory, but looking at
> what is actually happening, I'm wondering, was that the actual plan?
>
> Right now on Linux we have two browsers that support EME (that I'm
> aware of; please correct me if there are more). One of them is the
> open source Chromium browser and the other is the proprietary /
> closed-source Chrome browser, which is based on Chromium and adds a
> few extra bits. One of these extra bits is a CDM that is actually
> useful for something, that being Widevine for playing Netflix content.
>
> Interestingly (or perhaps as expected?) the open source version
> (Chromium), while fully supporting the EME spec and otherwise being
> able to run the same plugins that Chrome can (including proprietary
> plugins like Flash), cannot run the Widevine CDM. At first, it may
> seem that there may be some technical incompatibility that would be
> resolved in the near future, but upon further inspection, it appears
> that the CDM is actively refusing to load on the open source version
> of the browser. And, to my knowledge, all other browsers on other
> platforms supporting Netflix-compatible CDMs are also completely
> proprietary.
>
> Is that a temporary state, or is it what we have to look forward to?
> And if this is the future, was it the plan all along to only allow
> actually useful CDMs to run only on fully-closed browsers and not on
> open-source browsers that implement the EME interface (and are thus
> willing to interface with closed CDMs)?
>
>
>