HTML5-based recording

[michalstocki]

Background

From version 42 of Google Chrome, flash plugin is disabled by default (issue #53). After problems which occurred with earlier Chrome versions, this is forcible suggestion to use modern web technologies. WebRTC API and Web Audio (and several other) works great. From my point of view, the most proper direction is to provide multi-technology support in FWR. I already have some experience with recording audio via HTML5. There is a lot of work which should be done to provide consistent API for both Flash-based and HTML5-based recording. The only problem is that I need a sponsor.

Do we need HTML5-based recording in FWR?

The answer is not obvious. Maybe a better solution will be just using HTML5-based recording library without any Flash fallback? The problem is Internet Explorer and Safari which still haven't getUserMedia and WebAudio APIs. Internet Explorer will probably have a support for audio recording, but will provide different API than Firefox, Chrome and Opera. Unfortunatelly we don't know when it will be released. To be able to record audio using HTML5, we need a browser to support following APIs:

• getUserMedia (part of WebRTC API)
• Web Audio API
• Blob

furthermore to to convert recorded audio into WAV file and download it or upload to a server, we need:

• Typed Arrays
• Web Workers
• Blob URLs
• XMLHttpRequest v2

What needs to be done?

Most of the work for recording sound via HTML5 is done in other open source libraries such as JSSoundRecorder. Nevertheless we need to define and implement complete new API which will work in both HTML5-based and Flash-based scenarios. Unfortunately full compatibility is not possible because of the annoying Flash button which is required for uploading a recording.