This week Michael Bebenita, a developer for Mozilla, announced the release of a JavaScript-based H.264 decoder that is designed to run natively in web browsers. The creator of JavaScript, Brendan Eich, demonstrated the decoder, which is being called Broadway, at the recent OOPSLA conference.
Broadway is able to display video at 30 frames per second on conventional hardware, which is a valid demonstration of the potential of JavaScript for creating compelling games and applications. The demonstration that Eich provided attracted enough attention that the developers published the source code for the decoder.
As to why video is an effective method of demonstrating the power of JavaScript, Bebenita stated that “Video decoding is a very computationally-intensive process, which is one reason that phones often provide specialized hardware implementations. Being able to decode at 30 frames a second [in JavaScript] on laptop hardware is a Big Deal, and points to a new target for JS performance: comparable to tightly-written C code.”
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