It's Asa on the tee vee. He's talkin' into the Internets.

Asa Dotzler has been trying to get live streaming working with our new native video support that’s coming with Firefox 3.1.  That is, video that is taken by a camera, encoded and pushed directly out to a web server instead of stored as a file so you can watch an event in real time.  The screenshot above is the first time – that I know of – where anyone has gotten this working in the browser without some kind of plug-in involved.  (And it’s free software, end-to-end, which is also nice.)

We managed to get the lag down to 2-3 seconds at one point.  We can probably get it even lower.  But it’s a fantastic start.

Asa isn’t the most technical guy, but he managed to get it working by mostly following the instructions on this page.  And it mostly works out of the box.  There are some bugs to fix on our end, and encoding theora without dedicated hardware is kind of painful, but it’s great to see the possibilities open up when we’ve got dedicated video support directly in the browser.

Once nice thing about this blog is that anyone who has commit access to the mozilla hg repo can make a post about a new feature. We’ve hoping to see a lot of great content on that blog. Subscribe and enjoy!