Re: WebVR and DRM

Dear Florian,


Thx for your quick reply. I am asking this question based on a discussion we had in a VR Workshop at 6th FOKUS Media Web Symposium<https://www.fokus.fraunhofer.de/go/mws/detailedprogram> where the Work of WebVR CG was also introduced (By Francois Daoust from W3C). Through EME API you can play encrypted video on the Web so the question is valid why you cannot play encrypted 360° video on the Web. I know there are technical limitations as you mentioned.


BR,

Louay


________________________________
From: Florian Bösch <pyalot@gmail.com>
Sent: Monday, July 10, 2017 10:21 AM
To: Bassbouss, Louay
Cc: public-webvr@w3.org; Pham, Stefan
Subject: Re: WebVR and DRM

Dear Louay,

DRM is an ineffective and usability hindering measure that serves no purpose whatsoever at all. In order to render anything in WebVR you have got to render it in WebGL. To render a video in WebGL the plain texture has to be uploaded to WebGL (i.e. to the GPU). That means that a gl.texture2D(yourvideo) call would decrypt the obfuscated video frame and put the plain video frame into GPU vram, where it can be readPixel'ed or otherwise be read out. Since DRM attempts to obfuscate the plain content, that can obviously not work, so it will never be possible to render DRM content inside a usable WebGL context. The best you could hope for is convince a GPU manufacturer to include functionality in drivers to overlay a portion of the screen with DRM'ed content. However, such content could not be shaded, depth-tested, stencil'ed, transformed, etc. It would be entirely outside of the normal rendering pipeline, and therefore be quite useless in 3D applications.

If you'd like to render video in WebVR (i.e. WebVR) please consider not using user hostile technologies because as just demonstrated, they destroy usability and make everything extremely awkward, for no real gain. The presence of DRM on a video does not preclude it landing on TPB in any way. As demonstrated in plenty of examples the main purpose of DRM is to introduce vendor-lock-in and make it harder for the competition by dishonest means. If your offering cannot exist without the inclusion of user-hostile technologies, perhaps this is a clear sign that your offering is garbage.

Thanks,
Florian Bösch

On Mon, Jul 10, 2017 at 9:15 AM, Bassbouss, Louay <louay.bassbouss@fokus.fraunhofer.de<mailto:louay.bassbouss@fokus.fraunhofer.de>> wrote:

Dear Group members,


I am not sure if this topic is already discussed in the group. Is there a way to render DRM content for example encrypted 360° videos using WebVR? If not, do you plan to address this issue in the future maybe in WebVR Working Group Charter?


Thanks,

Louay Bassbouss