Note: this post was originally posted to the silverorange labs blog and was written by Mike Gauthier. Mike and other people at silverorange put this demo together for the 35 days project and we thank them.

Also note that the demo below is extremely CPU-intensive. If you’re interested in the effect and you don’t have a really fast CPU you can just watch a screencast of the effect.

Last note: This demo requires Firefox 3.5 Beta99 or later.. If you have Beta 4 installed you should be able to use Help -> Check for updates… to get to the latest beta. Beta 4 included a bug where video data couldn’t be copied to the canvas.

Our work with Mozilla led us to do some experiments on what can be done with the new HTML5 functionality in Firefox 3.5. With <canvas> and the new HTML5 <video> element, we created a demo that pulls color information out of a live playing video and uses it to style a border around the video. The result is not unlike the tackiest of back-lit LCD tvs.

How It Works

The color calculation is done by drawing video frames to a HTML5 canvas element and then computing the average color of the canvas. To make computing the average color faster, the video frame is resampled onto a smaller canvas (this demo uses 50×50). Color accuracy can be improved at the cost of speed by using a larger canvas. Pushing video frames to the canvas is done as follows:

var canvas = document.getElementById('canvas');
var video = document.getElementById('video');
var context = canvas.getContext('2d');

// push frame to canvas
context.drawImage(video, 0, 0, canvas.width, canvas.height);

// get image data for color calculation
var data = context.getImageData(0, 0, canvas.width, canvas.height);

The computed color is then changed over time using a YUI animation.

The edges of the video are feathered using an SVG mask. Firefox 3.5 allows SVG masks to be applied to elements using a special CSS+SVG property. First, an SVG mask is defined inline in the document (note: this could also be defined externally). The mask is then applied to the video element using the following CSS rule:

#video {
    mask: url(index.html#m1);
}

There are two of other CSS+SVG properties available in FF3.5: clip-path and filter. To reference SVG styles in CSS use url(filename#element-id) or just url(#element-id) if the SVG is defined in the same file as the CSS.

Finally, the demo uses some new HTML CSS 3.0 features from Firefox 3.5. The box-shadow property, text-shadow property and rgba color model are used:

#main-feature {
    -moz-box-shadow: #000 0px 5px 50px;
}
#description {
    text-shadow: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.4) 1px 1px 2px;
}