Mozilla's new Rainbow developer prototype enables developers to bring video and audio recording to Firefox.
Mozilla Labs has introduced Rainbow,
a new developer prototype that brings video and audio recording to Firefox 4.
In an
Oct.
28 blog post, Anant Narayanan, an engineer at Mozilla Labs, said Rainbow
enables Web developers to access local video and audio recording capabilities
using just a few lines of JavaScript.
Narayanan said:
"The add-on generates files encoded in open formats: Theora (for video)
and Vorbis (for audio) in an Ogg container. The resulting files are accessible
in DOM using HTML5
File APIs, which may be used to upload them to a server. Check out the included
example to see how simple it really is!"
He said Mozilla has experimented with
audio
recording in the browser as part of the Jetpack prototype earlier and wants
to revisit the idea. "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," he added.
Mozilla's Rainbow is "pre-alpha" software at this point. And the
add-on only works with the Firefox
nightly
builds on a Mac, Narayanan said. "We're working hard to extend support
to Windows, Linux and 64-bit platforms as soon as possible (there are currently
no plans to support earlier versions of Firefox)."
Meanwhile,
work continues on the project. Narayanan said immediate efforts are focusing on
adding support for Windows and Linux, allowing live streaming of video feeds,
implementing a robust permissions mechanism, supporting WebM/VP8 video encoding
as an alternative to Ogg/Theora, and making Rainbow a "'restartless'
add-on" so users can get going instantly.
At
its
Google I/O conference
in May,
Google
and partners announced support for the
VP8 codec and the WebM project.
WebM is a multimedia container format
designed to provide a royalty-free, high-quality open video compression format
for use with HTML5 video. The project's development is sponsored by Google. A
WebM file consists of VP8 video and Vorbis audio streams, in a container based
on a profile of the Matroska multimedia container. The WebM project is
dedicated to developing a high-quality, open video format for the Web that is
freely available to everyone. The WebM launch is supported by Mozilla, Opera,
Adobe, Google and more than 40 other publishers, and software and hardware
vendors.
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