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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).

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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?

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