New Media Capture Audio Prototype Released

As we announced in April, we have been working hard on developing a prototype to cover the Media Capture API, a draft specification that defines HTML form enhancements to provide access to the audio, image and video capture capabilities of a device.

As such, I am delighted to be able to announce that today we have the first release of the prototype, which includes Audio capabilities only, but we do plan to add image and video support over the next month or so.

This first version of the Media Capture prototype implements the Audio portion of this W3C specification. We have also included a sample that demonstrates how to properly utilize the APIs that the IE9 plugin exposes.

Once a user has connected their microphone and the drivers are properly installed, they can click on the microphone iconand the web page will capture the sound until it either hears silence or it is stopped (the captured sequence is preserved), or cancelled (captured sequence is discarded). When the Play button is pressed, the sounds just captured will play back.

A screenshot of the Audio Capture Demo that lets you record and play back captured sounds

Our next prototype will support Speech recognition and will implement the Microsoft proposal available on the W3C website here and here. It will also include two implementations of the sample apps that are described in sections 5.1 and 5.2 of the draft.

Then, after that, we will deliver another update to the Media Capture prototype that will add video capabilities. We are very excited about the ability of these extensions to the existing IE9 capabilities to showcase how everybody will be able to interact in an ever more natural way with the Web going forward.

Again, my thanks to you for helping Microsoft and the Internet Explorer team build a better and more interoperable Web, and I encourage you to continue participating in the appropriate standards bodies to help finalize the specifications.

So stay tuned for all this goodness!

Thanks,

Claudio Caldato,

Principal Program Manager, Interoperability Strategy Team