14 DAY TRIAL // The future of the web is all about apps, the web is not about information alone anymore it's about functionality. But for this to happen, browsers need to be able to carry out increasingly sophisticated tasks. Mozilla is tacking one of the problems with Rainbow, a Firefox add-on that adds video and audio recoding functionality to the browser, enabling websites to make use of it.
The add-on has recently been updated, Rainbow 0.3 adds several new features, to be expected this early in the development process.
"Rainbow can now record the contents of a canvas. Think of a canvas acting as the video source instead of a webcam," Mozilla explains.
There are several interesting scenarios where this may come in rather handy. With access to the canvas, anything animated or displayed via HTML5 can be recorded with Rainbow.
HTML5 games are one example, but specially-built applications could be a target as well.
"We added experimental support for sending theora video streams to an Icecast server. In our tests, there was significant delay (ranging between 5 and 10 seconds) in display of video, so it is not suitable for real-time applications. It is, however, quite usable for broadcasting scenarios," Mozilla writes.
This setup enables the browser to connect to an Icecast server which can then distribute the stream to its clients.
"We have removed the ability to send video streams over websockets, a feature we added in the 0.2 release," Mozilla added.
There's a very solid reason for this, the latest Firefox 4.0 betas no longer support Websockets out of the box. The promising protocol was found to have some serious security issues, which couldn't be easily fixed, so Mozilla took the safe approach and disable support for it.
"The extension has been updated to work on the latest Firefox beta and Minefield versions, as of today. Versions of Firefox before beta10 will no longer be supported," Mozilla adds. Of course, if you're using such an experimental add-on, you're probably running the latest Firefox 4.0 release anyway.