This article is more than 1 year old

Mozilla brews Firefox add-on for audio-video recording

Multimedia for the web built on the web

Mozilla Labs is developing a Firefox add-on that lets web developers access a machine's local video and audio recording devices using a few lines of JavaScript.

Known as Rainbow, this early prototype generates files in open formats, and these files can then be accessed via the HTML5 File APIs and moved onto a server. "There have been great strides on video playback recently, but there’s still some work to be done before users can create multimedia content for the web, on the web," reads a blog post from Mozilla man Anant Narayanan.

Currently, the add-on generates files in the open Theora (video) and Vorbis (audio) formats in an Ogg container. But Narayanan and team also plan to add support for Google's new WebM format, based on the VP8 codec that was acquired with the purchase of compression outfit On2 Technologies. There are also plans to provide a "robust" permissions mechanism and to allow live streaming of video feeds.

The pre-alpha add-on also works with nightly builds of Firefox for the Mac. But the team is "working hard" to offer versions for Windows, Linux, and 64-bit platforms. ®

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like