Video capture and recording from a web page

Question

I am trying to build a web application that can capture audio and video from a web cam and upload it to our server. The solution should work with both Windows and Mac. Supporting mobile devices would be a plus, but is not required. My boss would prefer if the platform/framework was from Microsoft.

My initial impulse was to start looking into SilverLight... Interestingly, there were plenty of demos showing how to capture video and display it to the user, followed by many comments suggesting that for the application to be useful we need some way to save/upload the video, followed by the original poster saying that of COURSE it's possible and easy and that he is working on an updated demo that does just that, followed by silence. As far as I can tell SilverLight will not record video.

I already have a component that can record video in a winforms application using DirectShow, but the goal is to build something that is cross-platform so that our program will work for Mac users as well as Windows users. A desktop application is not out of the question, but we would much prefer to stick to a web page.

I am aware that Flash can record video from within a browser, but the higher ups would prefer to avoid flash. Is there any other way to record video captured from a user's webcam from within a web browser?

Answer 1

To build a cross-platform solution you shall consider either one of :

• VLCj
• Xuggler
• JMF

I have been working lately with VLCj.

Answer 2

I am aware that Flash can record video from within a browser, but the higher ups would prefer to avoid flash. Is there any other way to record video captured from a user's webcam from within a web browser?

Unfortunately on the desktop there is no other production ready way to record video in a web page except a Flash client linked to a media server like Red5 or Wowza. The Flash client captures and encodes the video and audio and the media server stores the encoded data in .flv or .f4v/.mp4 files.

On mobile you could use HTML Media Capture which, for recording video, is widely supported on all mobile browsers. The downside is that you'd end up with .mov files from iOS and .mp4 and .3gp files from Android devices. The .mov and .3gp files need to be transcoded before they can be used on other platforms.

Quick commercial solutions that implement the above include HDFVR (downloadable) and Pipe (cloud video recording).