14 DAY TRIAL // Firefox 4.0 development may not be going as fast as Mozilla had hoped, not that long-time Firefox fans will be surprised, but one part of Mozilla has been on a roll lately, Mozilla Labs. The experimental arm has introduced yet another project, Rainbow, which aims to improve the recording, of audio and video, capabilities of the browser.
"The Rainbow add-on for Firefox is an early developer prototype that enables web developers to access local video and audio recording capabilities using just a few lines of JavaScript," Mozilla Labs' Anant Narayanan explained.
"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," he added.
The need for this sort of functionality is rather obvious. There are a number of websites dedicated to live streaming. YouTube enables you to record video straight from your webcam and post it on the site.
As the web gets more interactive and more social, media content created by users will become increasingly important.
However, pretty much the only way to access a user's webcam or microphone is via Flash which has built in APIs for hardware access. If you don't want to use Flash though, your possibilities are very limited.
Mozilla is a strong believer in open standards and wants to supply a way of accessing this hardware via standardized and open methods. HTML5 provides a base for this type of functionality, but there still are plenty of things to be done.
Rainbow is very experimental and the current release is labeled as pre-alpha. What's more, it only works in Firefox 4.0 nightly builds for Mac.
The developers want to extend the support to all platforms, Windows, Mac, Linux. They also plan to add a few crucial new features like the possibility to stream live video and encode videos in the WebM format.