More about the Chrome HTML Video Codec Change (The Chromium Blog) [LWN.net]

More about the Chrome HTML Video Codec Change (The Chromium Blog)

Posted Jan 17, 2011 11:36 UTC (Mon) by krake (subscriber, #55996)
In reply to: More about the Chrome HTML Video Codec Change (The Chromium Blog) by drag
Parent article: More about the Chrome HTML Video Codec Change (The Chromium Blog)

Not for my purposes, no. The higher it stays in the stack the better it is for all of us.

My line of thinking is that decryption in the output hardware does not require any special kind of software in the operating system or higher up, making content accessible even by users of alternative operating systems, media players and browsers.

If done higher up we end up with crap like Microsoft's "secure media path".

...trying then to convince people that they should drop 300 dollars on non-existent hardware...

I didn't get that part. My understanding is that very specific data processing, e.g. media decoding, is first implemented in software to be easily deployable to the mass market even if it more efficient to be implemented in hardware.

So after a pure software base period there is a transitional period where hardware implementation become common. Some customers might even prefer a hardware based solution and buy devices offering such in favor over ones with host software based solutions.

But I could be mistaken and deployment of host software based solution is always delayed until a significant portion of the market has hardware based solutions available as well. My personal impression was that it doesn't work that way though.

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More about the Chrome HTML Video Codec Change (The Chromium Blog)

Posted Jan 17, 2011 12:14 UTC (Mon) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

> I didn't get that part. My understanding is that very specific data processing, e.g. media decoding, is first implemented in software to be easily deployable to the mass market even if it more efficient to be implemented in hardware.

The hardware you talk about doesn't exist. That's what I mean. I am sure that it's all fine and dandy in some abstract theoretical sense.

Remember the problem domain here: we are looking for a flash replacement. I know I am in fantasy land also, but it's just really speculation. It's probably a horrible idea to try to obfuscate decryption in javascript, but requiring people to purchase new hardware is even less likely to work.

More about the Chrome HTML Video Codec Change (The Chromium Blog)

Posted Jan 18, 2011 11:51 UTC (Tue) by krake (subscriber, #55996) [Link]

The hardware you talk about doesn't exist. That's what I mean.

I see. As I said, my impression was that hardware gets replaced at some point by newer one, introducing capabilities formerly available only in software.

But I might be mistaken and all graphics chips always had video decoding in them, even for codecs that didn't exist yet.

As a software engineer I surely would appreciate some of that fairy dust these hardware engineers seems to have at their disposal, being able to deploy algorithms before they are invented.