Putting DRM on CC videos is kind of evil… but also kind of expected of a video platform to do.
In the long run, from a purely economic point of view, it could even make sense for YT to charge users for uploading non-monetized videos. It would destroy even more good faith, but would “make sense” on paper.
I feel like this goes back to the old saying: If you are not paying for it, then you are not the customer.
For YouTube, it isn’t so much destroying good faith rather than preventing a competitor from forming with enough traction to threaten YouTube’s business model.
One reason to use a browser with no DRM capabilities available is that it tells them in advance you won’t be visiting any more if they try to force DRM on everyone.
Which browsers don’t?
By default, LibreWolf disables Widevine and the Cisco OpenH264 library plugins, but you can easily enable them in the settings.
Some Linux distros also don’t enable those plugins in their native Firefox builds (I believe Fedora is one example, but my info may be outdated), though they can usually be enabled manually without much issue (might need to download a couple of extra packages, not certain).
So it depends on the distro and build.
On Windows, that isn’t an issue, though. At least not for vanilla Firefox and pretty much all Chromium browsers.
Safari on MacOS has its own DRM. Not quite sure how it’s implemented on sites that use Widevine (Netflix) because they still work, but Safari doesn’t use Widevine at all (except on iOS for some reason).
Librewolf and the “EME-free” builds of Firefox are the two I know of. You can also set
media.eme.enabledandbrowser.eme.ui.enabledto false in any Firefox-based browser.I use standard Firefox, how do i set those to false? Are they settings?
They’ve removed the ability to do it through the normal settings menu a few years ago, so you’d have to type
about:configin the Firefox url bar and do it there. You’ll get a warning about how dangerous it is, and then you can type the names of preferences you want to change and double-click on them when they appear to turn those ones on or off. Turning off EME can be safely done without any side effects, but it’s not recommended to change anything else in there unless you know what it does.It would mean you can’t watch e.g. Netflix and some TV station websites won’t be able to play video — although I’ve found that on others, the TV programs play just fine but the ads don’t work.
I had an error message pop up on my kodi yesterday when I tried to watch a preview; it may have included an url that resembles the link here…
ahh butts
