Rainbow add-on for Firefox records audio and video

In keeping with Mozilla’s vision of innovation and progression around its popular browser Firefox, Mozilla have extended the browser’s media capabilities by adding audio and video recording functionality to the browser also. Mozilla Labs have released an early developer prototype of a Firefox add-on called Rainbow that allows users to record audio and video with a few lines of JavaScript.

The add-on generates files encoded in open formats: Theora for video, and Vorbis in an Ogg container for audio. The files are accessible from the DOM using HTML5 File APIs, where they can be uploaded to a server.

Mozilla have a few improvements to the add-on they intend to make in the near future:

• Support for Windows and Linux
• Allow live streaming of video feeds
• Implement a robust permissions mechanism
• Support WebM/VP8 video encoding as an alternative to Ogg/Theora
• Make Rainbow a restartless addon so users can get going instantly

The pre-alpha release of this add-on only works with Firefox nightly builds on a Mac, with support for Windows, Linux, and 64 bit platforms coming soon. Rainbow can be downloaded directly from the Add-ons for Firefox website, or from GitHub if you prefer.