Mozilla Gives Firefox a New Add-On for Audio and Video Recording

Mozilla Labs has been working hard on browser-based audio and video — not just for playback, but also for recording. Labs’ newest creation, called Rainbow, lets developers access your hardware’s video and audio recording capabilities with a few lines of JavaScript.

The files created are all in open-source formats, including Theora, Vorbis and Ogg (support for WebM and other formats are planned in the product’s roadmap). Once media is captured, files can be accessed via the DOM with HTML5 File APIs.

Mozilla also wants to enable live streaming video capabilities for the add-on.

Mozilla Labs employee Anant Narayanan wrote in a blog post today that the Labs team had “experimented with audio recording in the browser as part of the Jetpack prototype.” This development, however, is still a pre-alpha prototype at the moment. As such, it only works with Firefoxnightly builds on Mac devices.

Another Mozilla experiment we’ve liked a lot lately is Chromeless, a DIY tool for developers who want to create their own web browser UIs.

In general, multimedia as part of the web browser experience is becoming increasingly experimental and interactive; we’re excited to see where Mozilla and developers take Rainbow in the near future. If you want to give it a whirl, you can check out the source on Github.

[via mashable]

Posted in: Mozilla