While much of the emphasis on multimedia content on the web involves playback, Mozilla is working to extend recording capabilities in the browser as well. Today Mozilla Labs has released an early version of a new add-on for Firefox – Rainbow – that will enable web developers to access local video and audio recording capabilities in the browser.
The add-on generates files that are encoded in open formats – Theora for video and Vorbis for audio in an Ogg container. These files are accessible in DOM using HTML5 APIs, which can be used to upload them to a server.
This pre-alpha version only works with the Firefox nightly builds on a Mac, although there are plans to add support for Windows and Linux. Also on the “to do” list will be live streaming of video feeds, as well as support for WebM/VP8 video encoding as an alternative to Ogg/Theora.
The code is available on GitHub.
