for some reason both Chrome and Firefox blocks WebCam access to http://192.168.66.53:81/ , and refuse to allow camera access the normal way. In Chrome i can fix it by going to chrome://flags/#unsafely-treat-insecure-origin-as-secure and adding http://192.168.66.53:81/ to the list, but how can i give webcam access in Firefox?
Related
Environment
Browser: Chrome 87.0.4280.141
OS: Windows 10 Home
Zoom Version: 5.4.6(59296.1207)
I have a website that can access the the user's camera and take a short video on request. I am attempting to achieve this using the MediaDevices web api.
This is all working fine except in two scenarios. When I am in a Zoom or MS Teams meeting on my Windows laptop (with camera on), I have noticed that my webapp fails to capture my video. If I use the web clients for zoom or msteams then it works as expected. Also, if I use mac OS instead of my Windows laptop then this works fine.
When I debug this I get the following error message thrown when trying to access userMedia.
DOMException: Could not start video source
The code that I am using to access UserMedia is the following:
return await navigator.mediaDevices.getUserMedia({video: true});
Is there anything I can do to allow me to user my webcam in the browser as well as on the MS Teams or Zoom clients?
Is there anything I can do to allow me to user my webcam in the browser as well as on the MS Teams or Zoom clients?
No, sorry to say.
The native videoconference client programs attach to your webcam, and so does the browser when you use gUM. The first process to attach wins.
A second webcam may solve your problem by letting your videoconference progam use one and your browser use the other. If you use Chrome, pick the camera you want to use with your browser from the pulldown menu on this page.
chrome://settings/content/camera
According to the prompt in the Alexa developer's console, one should be able to click and hold the mic image and then speak to Alexa. This feature seems to be disabled for me (the microphone image is crossed out with a red cross, not sure what the significance of it is):
This occurs in various browsers, Firefox, Chrome, etc. I'm on Mac:
What can be causing this not to work as designed?
This works for me
try clearing your browser's privacy settings and make sure it prompts you for permission to use the microphone. Grant permission to use the microphone and try again. To use the microphone it must not have an X and you click while speaking to the browser.
I have been testing the Apple CoreMediaIO sample camera on Mac OS X 10.9 Mavericks.
Locally the applications i have tried could detect and recognize the sample camera automatically (like Skype, AVRecorder - Apple's AVFoundation capture API sample)
In Mozilla Firefox and Opera browsers the camera has been detected automatically on the Flash Player based sites that i have checked (for example Adobe's Cirrus sample), although in Safari and Chrome the sample camera was missing from the video input devices list.
How could i make these browsers recognize the CoreMediaIO sample camera on such a website?
Safari:
The problem causing this to happen is that on Mavericks the current Safari uses a sandboxed Flash Player which refuses to detect the sample camera.
You can solve this by allowing sites to run Flash Player in unsafe mode: (make sure you have allowed the website to use your cameras on the Flash Player pop-up window)
Go to Safari/Preferences.
Go to the Security page.
Click Manage Website Settings.
On the left pane select Adobe Flash Player.
Select the website you have allowed to use the camera and want to use the camera with.
Click on the combobox.
Select Run in Unsafe Mode.
On the pop-up window choose Trust.
Refresh the website.
From now on, Safari can detect the sample camera on the specific website.
I could not find a better/all-around solution yet.
Chrome:
This problem is mainly based on the Mac OS X AVFoundation API being disabled by default in the current Chrome (the CoreMediaIO sample uses it).
There are various methods to make Chrome detect the sample camera.
So far my best solution is the following:
Open a new tab in chrome.
Go to chrome://flags.
Search for "Enable use of Mac OS X AVFoundation APIs, instead of QTKit, Mac" entry.
Set the above-mentioned entry to Enabled.
Relaunch Chrome.
As far as i could get, the key AVFoundation flag's internal ID is IDS_FLAGS_DISABLE_AVFOUNDATION_NAME.
As long as you try to use AVFoundation based things in Chrome (OS X Mavericks) you will probably need this. (I don't really know why the default value is disabled, but i hope they will change it as Apple tends to deprecate QTKit.)
Other solutions that i prefer less:
Disabling Pepper Flash (PPAPI) and using NPAPI Flash Player instead.
Open a new tab in chrome.
Go to chrome://plugins.
Hit the plus (+) sign in the upper right corner next to Details.
Search for the Adobe Flash Player plugin section.
Locate the Pepper Flash version (PPAPI type).
Click Disable.
Refresh the website.
Google intends to deprecate NPAPI Flash Player soon, which leaves the Pepper Flash (PPAPI) as the only alternative, that was the reason to try and find a better solution than this. I don't recommend to rely on this solution considering the future of NPAPI Flash Player.
There is another temporary solution involving Mozilla Firefox. I don't know why exactly this works and i think this might easily change in the future, but i tried and verified that it works at the moment:
Close Chrome entirely (Chrome/Quit Google Chrome or Command+Q).
Start Firefox.
Go to the website you would like to use the camera with (any Flash Player based site works that calls for camera list).
Open Chrome.
Close Firefox.
Go to the website in Chrome.
If you close Chrome you will have to redo the process from Step #2. It seems like Firefox initializes something that makes the Chrome startup different and causes it to detect the sample camera. I don't recommend to rely on this though.
I'm experiencing issues with the YouTube player failing to load when the power save mode is enabled in Safari 6.1 and 7 on OSX. The issue doesn't happen if the youtube user is using the experimental HTML5 player, but it's still in beta and most people are still using the Flash player. The "disable plugins to save power" option is on by default in most new versions of Safari and this causes the YouTube iFrame API to enter an endless loop as it tries to initialize the player.
Is there any attribute on the window or navigator objects that would possibly indicate that the power save mode is enabled so that I can warn users?
This issue is semi-intentional. The Power Saver mode in Safari deliberately stops flash content. You can read more about it in this article.
If the flash content is 'front and centre' (within a 3000 x 3000 pixel boundary starting at the top left corner of the document) it should still play. So it may help, if the youtube video is off to the side of the page, to try and centre it. Apple says content will not play if it is in the margins (see this page under the Safari Power Saver heading).
Well i do not think there is any readable JS property to know that,
if so Apple would have a flawed design, and the Safari Users would get nagged to disable that mode, in order to have the web site working "properly" ...
What you could do of course is to try to make a server call on your web site via flash, and then try to read the changed session variable via JavaScript, then you would know ...
What technologies would I need to know to write an app like the now defunct Microsoft SharedView or something like TeamViewer? Any way to do it with a browser and not need a client app?
I'm a .NET developer, but figure I'd need to know C++ or driver stuff?
How would you stream the users desktop to another user? How do you even capture it in realtime?
I can imagine how you could take screenshots of the desktop and transfer them, but how do you capture live video of the screen of application and stream it to another user.
There are many apps that do this: Skype, GotoMeeting, TeamViewer, SharedView, Citrix, logmein, etc. but I'd like to write my own.
How would I get this to work on Windows, tablets, droids, etc...?
The browser seems to be a good platform for this, but there are some limitations
1 - flash doesn't work at all on IOS, and is not widely available on android.
2- Webrtc works with chrome, firefox and opera on mac/pc/linux, and with firefox/chrome on android. There's librairies to use webrtc from an IOS native app(in objective C). Screen Sharing on the other hand only works with chrome (pc/mac/linux). There's a work in progress in firefox.
3- Installation of browser plugins will be hard if not impossible on various platforms, but it can open some possibility : on chrome and firefox you can make them with javascript. For example a javascript extention can share a tab in chrome.
Using javascript you can stream from a desktop to any other desktop / android.