I’m working on a C++ application which takes microphone input, processes it, and plays back some audio. The processing will incorporate a database located on a server. For ease of creating UI and for maximum portability, I’m thinking it would be nice to have the front end be done in HTML. Essentially, I want to record audio in a browser, send that audio to the server for processing, and then receive audio from the server which will then be played back inside the browser.
Obviously, it would be nice if HTML5 supported microphone input, but it does not. So, I will need to create a plugin of some kind in order to make this happen. NPAPI scares me because of the security issues involved, so I was looking into PPAPI and Native Client. Native Client does not yet support microphone input, and I believe that the PPAPI audio input API would be limited to a dev build of Chrome. FireBreath doesn’t look like it supports any microphone function either. So, I believe my options are:
- Write my own NPAPI plugin to record the audio
- Use Flash to get microphone input
- Bail on browsers altogether and just make a native application
The target audience for this is young children and people who aren’t computer-adept. I’d like to make it as portable and simple to use as possible. Any suggestions?
If you can do it all in Flash and have the relevant knowledge, that would probably be the best solution:
You can avoid writing platform-specific code, delivery/updating is easy and Flash has broad coverage so users don’t need to install any custom plugins.
You can write your own (platform-dependent) code for audio recording with FireBreath, just like you could in a plain NPAPI plugin. FireBreath just makes it easier for you to write the plugin, the result is still a NPAPI (and ActiveX) plugin with access to native APIs etc.