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Comment by phpnode | Hacker News Reader

I'm currently finishing off a project that would have seriously benefited from html5 webcam support. The current state of things is really frustrating, in the latest chrome and firefox you can access a webcam and take pictures, but it's not possible to actually do anything with the video stream, you can't broadcast it to the server without horrible (and slow) hacks, so it's really crippled. That's the frustrating thing about html5 generally at the moment, it's eventually going to be awesome, but you can't actually use a lot of it yet.

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This should hopefully change as WebRTC gets more fleshed out support. It's something I aim to try and tackle in my own webcam library (that was posted here a short while ago), but yeah. Finding an efficient way to even send a single frame is a bit awkward, and there's more than one way to do it.

As much as I am excited to see such hacks, a lot of the HTML5 goodness is just reinventing what Macromedia Flash did 5 years ago. The page turn JS, the audio recording JS, webcam js, etc have all been possible before with Flash quite easily in 10 or 15 lines. Not to mention it has been more reliable (no audio sync issues, no video drivers issues, etc) and it works with 99.3% [1] of the browsers in the market instead of just a few.

Proprietary or not but Flash still fills this need better than anything out there and it is sad to see that the so called better alternative is still in such a dismal shape (even in the latest release version of browsers).

[1] http://www.adobe.com/products/player_census/flashplayer/

I think the point is that the web platform should be able to do all these things natively.

Right now, the implementations aren't perfect - and cross-browser support is definitely lacking. But ultimately, I think it's hard to argue that the end goal of having this stuff baked in to HTML and JS is better than relying on a proprietary 3rd-party plugin.

Yes, I had to use flash, but of course that means I can't broadcast from mobile devices.

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