We blogged about some of our WebRTC efforts back in April. Today we have an exciting update for you on that front: getUserMedia has landed on mozilla-central! This means you will be able to use the API on the latest Nightly versions of Firefox, and it will eventually make its way to a release build.

getUserMedia is a DOM API that allows web pages to obtain video and audio input, for instance, from a webcam or microphone. We hope this will open the possibility of building a whole new class of web pages and applications. This DOM API is one component of the WebRTC project, which also includes APIs for peer-to-peer communication channels that will enable exchange of video steams, audio streams and arbitrary data.

We’re still working on the PeerConnection API, but getUserMedia is a great first step in the progression towards full WebRTC support in Firefox! We’ve certainly come a long way since the first image from a webcam appeared on a web page via a DOM API. (Not to mention audio recording support in Jetpack before that.)

We’ve implemented a prefixed version of the “Media Capture and Streams” standard being developed at the W3C. Not all portions of the specification have been implemented yet; most notably, we do not support the Constraints API (which allows the caller to request certain types of audio and video based on various parameters).

We have also implemented a Mozilla specific extension to the API: the first argument to mozGetUserMedia is a dictionary that will also accept the property {picture: true} in addition to {video: true} or {audio: true} . The picture API is an experiment to see if there is interest in a dedicated mechanism to obtain a single picture from the user’s camera, without having to set up a video stream. This could be useful in a profile picture upload page, or a photo sharing application, for example.

Without further ado, let’s start with a simple example! Make sure to create a pref named “ media.navigator.enabled ” and set it to true via about:config first. We’ve put the pref in place because we haven’t implemented a permissions model or any UI for prompting the user to authorize access to the camera or microphone. This release of the API is aimed at developers, and we’ll enable the pref by default after we have a permission model and UI that we’re happy with.

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There’s also a demo page where you can test the audio, video and picture capabilities of the API. Give it a whirl, and let us know what you think! We’re especially interested in feedback from the web developer community about the API and whether it will meet your use cases. You can leave comments on this post, or on the dev-media mailing list or newsgroup.

We encourage you to get involved with the project – there’s a lot of information about our ongoing efforts on the project wiki page. Posting on the mailing list with your questions, comments and suggestions is great way to get started. We also hang out on the #media IRC channel, feel free to drop in for an informal chat.

Happy hacking!