[vlc-devel] Signing the VLC ActiveX control

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

Hello Denver,

On Wed, Aug 05, 2009 at 09:04:39PM -0400, Denver Gingerich wrote :
> reliable enough for production use:
> 
> http://lists.xiph.org/pipermail/theora/2009-July/002555.html
> http://lists.xiph.org/pipermail/theora/2009-July/002557.html

VLC webplugin version < 0.9.6 on Windows can cause multiple crashes,
especially, when multiple plugins are loaded on the same page.

> I suspect this a result of the signing problems that the VLC people
> have had in the past (which has caused development of the control to
> languish), as described at
> http://wiki.videolan.org/ActiveX_Controls#Introduction:

True/false. There were many issues before. I am not sure if all are
solved, but it should be.

> "At some point, Microsoft Internet Explorer stopped allowing the
> installation of ActiveX controls unless.. they were signed to
> associate the software vendor's name with the file containing the
> ActiveX control. ...  In a web configuration, a Certificate Authority
> needs to digitally sign the ActiveX control. This comes at a cost
> which the VideoLAN project is not able to bear."
> 
> On the Theora list, Cristian Adam said he's had good experiences with
> the free Certum certificates:
> http://lists.xiph.org/pipermail/theora/2009-August/002591.html

Is this GPL compatible?

> In particular, he showed that with the Cortado Java applet, IE
> provides a very user-friendly message when the applet is signed with
> the Certum cert:
> http://ossguy.com/theora/cortado_signature_compare.png
Nice.

> I suspect a Certum cert would also work well for the VLC ActiveX
> control.  Has the VLC project considered using one?
No, we haven't. We have thought about using a VeriSign one, but there
were issue about GPL compatibility of such a solution.

> and easy-to-use so we can solve the web video problem once and for
> all.  I've talked about this in some detail at
> http://ossguy.com/?p=424 ("Seamless web video within reach") if you're
> interested.

With my very limited tests, it is possible to use vlc webplugins to make
IE understand <video> and <audio> tags, but there are many issues to
solve yet.


-- 
Jean-Baptiste Kempf
http://www.jbkempf.com/