Filed under: Video, News, Windows
DVD Jon cracks Google Video Viewer
by Marc Perton Jun 29th 2005 at 9:05AM
Just a day after its release, Google's VideoLAN-based Google Video Viewer has been cracked, by none other than "DVD Jon" Johansen, the infamous developer behind PyMusique and DeCSS. Google Video Viewer included code to prevent it from being used to play non-Google hosted videos. Jon's patch disables that, allowing the player to be used with any videos. Given that VideoLAN is open source, all I can say is, what was Google thinking? When you take an open source tool and try to make it proprietary, you're inviting a fight, and it's fitting that Jon was the one to take the fight to Google.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Jordan Running said 10:34AM on 6-29-2005
I don't think this is a big deal for Google or anybody else. Google distributed the source code to their version of VLC and knew, nay intended, that it would get modified. The engineer who wrote the "our servers only" code undoubtedly knew that it would be trivial to remove and probably told his supervisor as much. That they released it anyway is just confirms how little this bit of code means to them. And here's why: Nobody's going to use it. Okay, a couple hundred Slashdotters are going to download it just because they can. But the casual user -- perhaps 98% of people who will visit Google Video -- is never going to download Johansen's patch. They'll download the official player from Google and never think twice about it. Geeks who want a serious video player in their browser -- the other 2% -- will just download the real VLC player, which already has support for Google's videos in the source tree and will have it included in future builds.
Something like this might be interesting sometime down the road if Google builds Google Video into something more compelling. If they manage to create a video site with the kind of functionality and popularity of, say, Google News, then we might have something to talk about.
You're right in that Google was silly for making the software only play videos from their site in the first place. I fully expected them to release a video player that would play videos from across the web, and why wouldn't they. But even so, I think that this news is pretty much a non-event, and I don't expect any sort of fight to ensue unless Google tries to get away with some stupid counter-move.
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Kevin Ballard said 1:54PM on 6-29-2005
Ya know, Google said that they were making their video player so it won't stomp on any other video player in your browser. I'm guessing this is part of that - their video player only kicks in if you're viewing their videos.
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