[the_ancient]

Functionally, as far as displaying video goes, there is very little difference between a Flash Video player, and a Adobe CDM Video Player.

Sure it might have a slightly smaller attack surface because it does not have all the other flash "features" that are not really used any more, but do not fool yourself, it is still executing arbitrary code that is beyond your control, and any attempt to control what this code does could be considered a violation of DMCA.

It however in no way promotes the open web, I do not know where you get that from. This is the exact opposite of promoting the open web

As to who loses out, it is not just people that find DRM objectionable. Will Adobe DRM work on ARM for the various SBC system like the Raspberry pi? Doubtful.. Will there be a CMD for midori? Ice Weasel? or any of the other less popular browsers? Doubtful. With the Adobe CDM work well, and bug free with out killing system resources under Linux x86? Doubtful (it will probably work, just not well)

So we are back to a world where only "approved" platforms are allowed to use the web fully, this is direct opposition to W3C's stated mission.

[cpeterso]

I imagine that playing videos is the Flash Player's primary use case. With EME supporting only video decoding, we can sooner phase out support for Flash Player and everything else it drags along.

If Adobe's CDM can run while completely sandboxed from network and file access, then what if it was implemented in asm.js? Then "CDM.js" could be portable across all browser platforms and architectures. I'm not sure how well Firefox's JIT would optimize obfuscated asm.js code generated from obfuscated C++ code. :)

Disclosure: I used to work on Adobe's Flash Player team and I now work at Mozilla, so I have many conflicting personal and professional biases. :)

[stinkytaco]

>If Adobe's CDM can run while completely sandboxed from network and file access

I'll admit this isn't my area of expertise, but how would this be possible?

[chx]

The CDM and the server runs some sort of secure key exchange with the browser doing the actual network traffic. The browser is eavesdropping on the communication but that's what Diffie-Hellman, STS etc are solving. Then the browser gets the encrypted stream, hands it to the CDM which has some ties to the OS to be able to draw on the screen. Only tie to the OS is required, no files, no network. The browser can handle those.

[bzbarsky]

The EME spec is designed to make this feasible at least in principle: the browser hands the encrypted video bits to the CDM.

In the case of Adobe's CDM and Mozilla, this is one of the points that was explicitly negotiated: the CDM will be running in a sandbox.