Mozilla Labs' Rainbow 0.4 Improves Audio and Video Recording in Firefox

Mozilla is pressing on with its experimental Rainbow Firefox add-on which adds the capability of recording audio and video streams straight from the browser. The idea is to bolster work on online multimedia applications if this type of functionality is built into the browser.

The latest update for the add-on, Rainbow 0.4 brings a big change, it's now completely asynchronous, which means that apps have to be update to work, an usual risk when working with an experimental API.

"Version 0.4 of Rainbow is now available on addons.mozilla.org. To start with, we’d like to thank you for all the great feedback," Mozilla Labs' Anant Narayanan announced.

"The biggest change is that the Rainbow API is now completely asynchronous. This means you will have to update your code to work with the new API," he said.

"Error reporting is now much more robust. Hardware errors and other conditions will be reported your JavaScript via an asynchronous observer. It is now possible to preview video as a separate step from recording. We added an API call to take a snapshot of a live video as a PNG image," he listed the other notable changes.

Mozilla Labs' Rainbow is only half a year old but has already seen some big changes, to be expected in this early stage.

Much of the work is focused on making the technology work on all platforms supported by Firefox, Windows, Mac and Linux, which is difficult since developers have to leverage the libraries and capabilities native to each operating system.

One of the aims for the short term future is getting Rainbow to work properly on Linux since, currently, video recording is not supported. Another goal is to make it less dependent on external libraries.

The very latest Google Chrome 11 added support for the HTML5 speech input API. While the technology is different from Rainbow, it does indicate that browser makers are looking to add more advanced functionality for web applications to leverage.