What's the status of the HTML 5 <video> tag and webcam integration?

Ok, still no clear, definitive answers, so I went on and took a little action. The WHATWG would probably have an answer for me, so I decided to contact someone there. Didn't really know who it had to be, but fellow Dutchman Anne van Kesteren usually seems to know the Web's future pretty well - plus, he provides an e-mail address.

Translating his response probably won't do any good, so in short: there are some rough ideas on how to make it all work, but there's nothing tangible at the moment. The Device APIs and Policy Working Group is supposed to continue work on this.

Reading through their page makes me realize something else too - why only webcam access? If Google intends to move the OS to the browser, we'll need more than just webcams. Why not manage your iPod through a webapp too? Anything should be possible. I guess a whole new concept of 'trusted website' will have to evolve if functionality like this would come available, but well, there's a solution to pretty much anything, isn't there? ;-)

Updated!: HTMl5Rocks has a very good working demo of this now. Check it out here!

Here is a very interesting article with a demo, however the source has not been released yet: (Read the comments for more information on codecs used, socket server tech, etc)

https://labs.ericsson.com/developer-community/blog/beyond-html5-conversational-voice-and-video-implemented-webkit-gtk

We're working on a project like this..

About the Ericsson's demo that people mentioned; It only works with a patched webkit which isn't released (yet).

We haven't seen any other working projects so this is how we plan to do this:

• Implement the HTML Media Capture draft (available here) in order to access the raw data.
• Using websockets for sending local data and receiving remote data at the same time.
• Clients "register" on the websocket server with a callerID.
• Server has an "invite" API where caller1 "invites" caller2.
• The browser will play this using the HTML5 audio- and HTML5 video tag.

html5 is with us for good, the flash vs silverlight vs html5 question has been around for a while now, but it seems that the trends are pointing towards a merger between our desktop world and our online world. If you've taken a sneak peak at Mac's Lion OS, it is basically app centric, which rides that line between OS level and Online.

The Device API has been drafted and will come to all major browsers with time (WebKit is always the early adopter), but as we all know the w3c takes longer to officially approve additions to the HTML5 specification. Erikson Labs has released their camera/sound capture API (https://labs.ericsson.com/developer-community/blog/beyond-html5-audio-capture-web-browsers) so you can get started today with HTML5 and peripheral support.