Re: WebVR and DRM

Oh and I forgot to add 360° video for instance. Which youtube (and others)
implement with WebGL of course. It's never a terribly good idea to put a a
byzantine consortium making technical decisions in the way of those who
want to create good and innovative things. The inevitable effect is that
good and innovative things don't happen. Eventually the law will catch up
to the fact that DRM is just used to stifle innovation, erect barriers to
entry and exclude the competition. And when it does, all those who signed
those contracts will be as much on the hook as the content industry who
pushed DRM on everybody in the first place. I would be pretty uneasy if
there was a possibility my company could be found liable for an antitrust
violation of epic proportions, even if only a tiny fraction of that
liability would stick to any one defendant.

On Mon, Jul 10, 2017 at 8:54 PM, Florian Bösch <pyalot@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Mon, Jul 10, 2017 at 8:22 PM, Kieran Farr <kieran.farr@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>>
>>
>>    - The concept of a restricted Video Layer that supports existing
>>    web-based video DRM schemes would be a reasonable solution for most legacy
>>    publishers looking to get their "feet wet" with VR. I think this is a great
>>    idea and would kickstart many WebVR enabled sites -- especially if it can
>>    piggyback nicely off of the HTML5 video element's existing "goodness".
>>    Those that wish to make use of more advanced WebVR / 3D pipeline features
>>    would need to weigh that against their contractual rights for content
>>    access.
>>
>> I think that's pretty useless, for the same reasons that Facebook/Oculus
> felt it was pretty useless, and a few reasons on top of that.
>
>    - No mipmapping (hurts viewing fidelity overall, but also disables
>    ambient light effects)
>    - No anisotropy (hurts viewing fidelity)
>    - No syncing of video content and WebVR content
>    - No audio integration with anything attempting to do spatial audio
>    - No way to handle subtitles and the like in a VR friendly fashion (at
>    a proper place maybe outside the video frame, with a proper VR oriented
>    text rendering solution)
>    - No shading/integration with the rendering pipeline. That also means
>    no effects on the video surface used for UI or aesthetic reasons
>
> For anybody unfamiliar with the need to read out textures for rendering,
> please see this WebGL experiment: http://alteredqualia.com/three/
> examples/webgl_deferred_arealights_texture.html
>
> Ultimately, if you want good applications, those applications need to be
> able to work with the data they're supposed to operate with. If you can't,
> what you get is crap. This is a recurring trend throughout all DRM. It
> degrades user-experience for legitimate uses, while it does nothing to
> prevent illegitimate uses. The race to "ultimate DRM" is a race to quality
> rock bottom.
>