Urgent video chat application? sounds like trouble.... :)

I recently had to look into this for a project and found it to be very difficult and a bit unreliable. The best success I found was this:

1. Have processing launch an applescript (bat file on windows, other problems with this though, see below) 

2. Applescript launches VLC and starts a camera capture that streams over the network (could be other ways to send the video)

3. Have another computer launch a processing app that is set to look at the IP address of the computer sending the video signal. I used GSPipeline to capture the video over an IP. GSPipeline only works with Processing 1.5.1. IPCapture ( https://code.google.com/p/ipcapture/) however works with 2.0 and seems to be simpler to use (more like the built in Capture)

4. Show the video. 

This worked pretty well on a mac, once I figured out the stream settings from VLC, but it was pretty ugly compression and lots of frames were dropped occasionally. I also had to figure out the GStreamer stuff on the Processing end, which was crazy complicated, and very few tutorials/info about. BUT... when I moved to the windows side, I found the GStreamer plugins that worked on Mac were not available. In the end we weren't able to get it working in the way we needed for our project and went a different route.

A library I started playing with recently that seems like it could have some potential in this application is IPCapture ( https://code.google.com/p/ipcapture/) which allows for capturing a IP stream from a webcam (or an android device in my case) I had great results getting the video to stream without having to mess around with GStreamer plugins on the processing end. The last piece of the puzzle for that solution is to get a stream to be sent from processing.

Hopefully this helps get you started, sorry I don't have a complete solution.

good luck!

ak

I was looking for some libaray which can help me to stream video over the lan or internet on my PC. Actually I am a windows user and I was trying to get something like in built Capture. Anyway thanks again for the hint atleast I can start with IPCapture.  If I get any succes I'll let you know.  

Just found this:

http://www.shiffman.net/2010/11/13/streaming-video-with-udp-in-processing/

that should be helpful sending video in processing, maybe that paired with the IPCapture will do what you need.

good luck!

ak

Denial Shiffman exmple works on localhost but when I tried streaming the video on other system over LAN it doesn't show any video ... any help ? 

What I did was I gave my chatters a client application that used the built-in networking library to send text and video (from the built-in video library) to the server program.  Then the server program would capture the screen image and save it as a *.jpg file in a web directory where a serve-em-up web page just refreshed every so often with a new image.  

Was it crude?  yes.  Was it klunky?  yes  Was it amateurish?  yeah.  But it worked and no Microsoft or Google spying on our convo either (supposedly).  I reasoned that with AJAX in the web loader I could have gotten better frame rates, and only postage stamp sized video would travel on the low upload speeds of the user terminals, and actually my buddies didn't want their video used at all so they just got chat clients.  I was the only one on video.  But hey, it worked.  

You could try something like that.  Took about a week to code it, faster if you are good of course.  Good luck!  

Les Hall