I took a look at this a while ago. It seemed obvious since Flash can do it HTML should do it too. The good news is that there is a W3 workgroup for it: http://www.w3.org/2009..., with some relevant requirements: http://dev.w3.org/2009.... The bad news is that it's a W3 workgroup, AND the only browser rep. on it is from Opera. - Nick Lothian

When I was on the XForms WG, they had an alternate way of doing this using file upload: http://www.w3.org/MarkUp... You could specify mime-types and if there was a device capable of producing that type, it would use it. Obviously, it would be better to have a more JS friendly procedural API. I'd say the HTML5 community should aim high, you should be able to do audio/video conferencing as a JS application, and design appropriate APIs around that use case, which might require tweaking the APIs for streaming/chunking, changes to WebSocket, etc. - Ray Cromwell

Ask the WHATWG! http://www.whatwg.org/mailing.... HTML5 is in the "Final Call" stage, so if anything's going to change about it, it has to be now. - Hugh Guiney

Somehow I doubt they'd add a huge leap of functionality at this point in time. WebSockets would need support for binary to make this work efficiently (otherwise, JS would have to base-64 encode outgoing stream data in real time). Plus, the video tag would need a way to stream-in/out blocks at a time rather than reference complete movies, and it's not clear a dataURL hack would work. They're constrained by politically satisfying many implementors who want the simplist possible spec, whereas Adobe/Microsoft have only themselves to please. - Ray Cromwell

I'd be happy with a way to get local video into the browser, even if there was no sensible way to post it. At the moment you need to do VLC + stream to HTTP, plus the video needs to come from the same port any JS is served from to do video+canvas manipulation. That means you need mod_rewrite, too. I wonder how Palm/WebOS handles it? - Nick Lothian