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Comment by fleitz | Hacker News Reader

This is great. Does anyone know if it's possible to record video using HTML5? I'm looking for a drop in component that will let a person easily record a video from their webcam and am trying to avoid flash.

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We had to look into this: the only way to do it in a cross-browser/OS way is to use Flash. Fortunately, it's fairly simple to write a bare-bones Flash app that just creates JS hooks for all webcam functions (though the permission dialog and any video preview still needs to be in the Flash window).

Awesome, I'll have to look into that, are you grabbing video or just images?

We stream video: you can use a Flash media server (costs a lot of money), Wowza media server (costs less money), or red5 (open source) to stream. For images you can actually extract a bitmap from a frame of the video, which I imagine you can pass to JS and reassemble in canvas.

Is there any good documentation for setting up red5? My first attempt was a nightmare.

We just used Wowza, since they had an EC2 instance you could just boot up at a higher cost than a regular EC2 instance. The documentation is ok, not amazing, but getting it running is pretty trivial thanks to their examples.

You can use a developer's version of Wowza (the big limit is iPhone streaming is crippled).

A single license is like $1000, but you can instead pay by month ($60, IIRC).

Wowza also has a deal with Amazon, so you can run Wowza on EC2 and only pay by the hour (Wowza licensing included).

Have you been able to use Wowza with HTML5 using a livestream, not VOD?

Does not exist yet. There's no final spec for this, and Opera just started experimenting with it. http://my.opera.com/core/blog/2011/03/23/webcam-orientation-...

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