How to add video chat capability to my rails application?

Question

I've been googling about how to accomplish oneline chat for rails application and I've implemented a text chat version using Juggernaut. But for video chat, I only find flash&red5 might be a solution for me, but it's flash and java, which I'm relatively not good at. Is there a better solution?

Answer 1

I have researched this a little and the options are not great.

There are some nice-looking packages that cost real money. Tokbox.com, ooVoo (http://www.oovoo.com, looks free at first but free version has limits), VideoWhisper.com looks interesting -- they seem to sell a 2-way video chat package for a one-time fee, but it is PHP-based.

A simple Flash-based solution is definitely a good way to go. Flash has good video support and virtually everyone has it installed already. It's not that hard to learn enough Flash basics to do a simple 2-way video chat (see http://www.derekentringer.com/blog/fms-video-chat/ for an example of a trivial video chat script that is something like 30 lines of code). And you don't need to learn Java to use Red5 unless you want to customize it -- Red5 is the open-source video streaming server that makes it so you don't need to buy really a expensive Adobe Media Streaming server system. You just need to learn enough to set it up and get it running.

I'm certain there's an open-source or low-cost Flash script out there that handles a basic 2-way video chat, but I have yet to find it. If anyone does, please post it!

Answer 2

Here is a rails implementation of tokbox: http://github.com/njacobeus/tokboxer/