Question

I was curious in how would one program a webcam function on a website. Kind of like tokbox, but a simpler version between only 2 people, but other people could view it as well. Also what about chat? I think chat would just be as simple as AJAX/PHP/MySQL right? Forgive my ignorance.

Answer 1

The simplest way to get a video webchat application is to look at the sample code that comes with, say, Flash Media Server (or Wowza, or Red5). They’ve got a Flash-based sample that does pretty much exactly what you describe, including, as I recall, a chat function.

Start here for Red5’s version (Red5 is a java-based open source version of Adobe’s FMS):

http://code.google.com/p/red5/

You can, in theory, do the same thing with Silverlight, but it’s dramatically more difficult. The best option is to start here:

http://silverlightvideochat.codeplex.com/