How to develop a webcam function for a website?

Question

I was curious in how would one program a webcam function on a website. Kind of like tokbox, but a simpler version between only 2 people, but other people could view it as well. Also what about chat? I think chat would just be as simple as AJAX/PHP/MySQL right? Forgive my ignorance.

Answer 1

The simplest way to get a video webchat application is to look at the sample code that comes with, say, Flash Media Server (or Wowza, or Red5). They've got a Flash-based sample that does pretty much exactly what you describe, including, as I recall, a chat function.

Start here for Red5's version (Red5 is a java-based open source version of Adobe's FMS):

http://code.google.com/p/red5/

You can, in theory, do the same thing with Silverlight, but it's dramatically more difficult. The best option is to start here:

http://silverlightvideochat.codeplex.com/

Answer 2

If you want other people to view the chat you will need to extend one of those servers. Wowza does offer their servers as pre-configured packages on the amazon s3 service. You can download a trial version of Wowza and have up to 10 connections while you're doing development, but would need either a full license or license out the s3 servers for this.

I never used Red5, but did look at it briefly when implementing something similar.

One annoyance with wowza is you can't have multiple classes of onConnect to do authentication, you MUST have one class responsible for authentication. I tried having role based authentication in separate classes, and that method simply flows down to every method you configure in the XML.