Build A (local) Webcam With WebRTC In Less Than 20 Lines!


WebRTC is all kinds of super ninja epic awesomesauce stuff. If you haven’t looked in to it yet, you’re going to want to get on that soon. I’d suggest starting with the HTML5 Rocks post on getUserMedia.

Build Your Own Web Cam

Just how awesome is it? You can build a web page that shows your webcam and hooks up your microphone in 20 lines of JavaScript… and that includes feature detection with an error message for browsers that don’t support it!

The gist of it is this:

The first few line sets the options to ignore audio and get video. The next 3 lines do a bit of browser normalization to make sure “getUserMedia” is available. Then do the other half of feature detection, and exit the IIFE if it’s not available at all. Once you’re certain it’s ok, run the getUsermedia with the options that were previously set. If there’s an error, report it via console. If there’s no error, run the success function and tell the

You’ll need a couple lines of HTML and to make it look nice, a bit of CSS, too.

Note the use of the “autoplay” setting in the

How Well Does It Work?

See for yourself, with this fancy schamcy JSBin (and make sure you hit “allow” when your browser prompts you to access your camera:

WebRTC WebCam{.jsbin-embed}

If this doesn’t work for you, you’ll end up seeing a link that just says “WebRTC WebCam”… which won’t surprise me if you’re reading this in an RSS reader or in Safari or Internet Explorer. WebRTC is only workable in Chrome, Firefox and Opera at the time that I’m writing this. Be sure to check the usual “is it ready?” sites, for more info:

http://caniuse.com/#feat=stream

http://iswebrtcreadyyet.com/

Be More Awesome

From here, there are a lot of things you could do with WebRTC, including real-time chat rooms with audio and video. This gets pretty hairy pretty quickly, though. You’ll need to get some crazy STUN server awesomeness going in order to get peer to peer negotiations of video and audio formats handled. It’s a bit of a mess, at the moment, quite honestly. But the future looks amazing. And I’m diving in head first.

Testing Stripe.com WebHooks With Requestb.in