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Comment by peteysd | Hacker News Reader

Hmm. Not quite any browser. Only those that run Flash, it seems.

If anyone is wondering how this might be done without Flash/Java, WhatWG have spec'd recording for the HTML5 Stream API but I don't think it's properly defined or implemented in any browser yet:

http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/...

Here's something else that might be of some interest to you. Slightly off topic -- video chat implemented in HTML5.

https://labs.ericsson.com/developer-community/blog/beyond-ht...

Among other things, it doesn't yet define what codecs would be used in the audio capture. There's also a lot of comments in the draft that amount to "we'll figure out how this part would work later."

http://dev.w3.org/2009/dap/camera/ is probably a better link if you're interested in this stuff.

Phono is intended to be a unified jQuery API for real time communications (audio, video, chat, screen sharing). The Flash movie is an implementation detail -- the API is intended to be implementable with other media capture methods when they're available, including HTML5.

Why wouldn't Comet or various long polling techniques work? Or web sockets?

They're referring to the fact that Flash is the only way to record audio from the user's mic at this time. The spec linked by the grandparent outlines an HTML5 API for accessing the microphone.

Flash is also the only way to record video from a webcam at this time, as far as I know.

Technically Java applets (or custom browser plugins) should be able to work as well, but I don’t see much of an advantage over Flash (well, probably compatibility with 64-bit browsers). Certainly Flash is more common.

Java's security model is meaning a HUGE Java applet to do this. And a custom plugin requires that you get people to install it. Works if you're Google (that's how they do Voice in Gmail), but probably not if you're Joe's Bait Shop wanting to add a click to call application.

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