Question

This may or may not even be possible, but here’s the situation: I want to use the ActionScript 3 Camera class to capture a video from a local camera (webcam, built-in camera, etc) and then play that video back within the flash application.

I’m considering the possibility of sending it to a Flash Media Server and then streaming it back as an on-demand video, but I would ideally like to keep the whole thing client-side for best performance.

I’m open to the idea of using a different platform (Java was one consideration) as long as it can be embedded in a web page, but I would like to keep development as straightforward as possible and make the process of accessing the application as easy as possible for the end user, which is why I chose Flash initially.

If anyone knows of a way to do this I welcome any input.

Answer 1

Okay, here’s an update for anyone else who might be up against the same hurdle I was. I was able to accomplish what I wanted — to record a video, allow the user to preview it, then upload it from one flash application — by utilizing a utility written by Lee Felarca (zeropointnine — http://www.zeropointnine.com/ ) called flvEncoder.

The concept is as such:

1. Record audio and video data to raw format (much like Valentin Simonov suggested)
2. Pass the data to flvEncoder for encoding in Flash FLV format and get a ByteArray back. I know it seems redundant to say Flash FLV, but I word it that way because Flash and Adobe Media Player appear to be the only things capable of interpreting the result.
3. Create a NetStream instance and put it in Data Generation Mode, use the appendBytes() method to pass the encoded data to a Video object linked to an input NetStream.
4. Use FileReference.upload() to send the data to the server in an HTTP request.

It could potentially eat a lot of memory, but I only needed to record short videos anyway. I won’t post the code here because it’s messy and tied to a proprietary project, but I hope this information is helpful to someone. Thanks for the responses!