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Why webcams are busy?

Why do Hangouts in Google+ use a new plugin for webcams and voice instead of Flash?

  • I'm fairly sure that HTML5 doesn't have support for webcams yet - and definitely sure if it does, it hasn't been implemented in any popular browser - but why did Google choose to use a new plugin for the Hangouts feature in Google+ instead of Flash, which is ubiquitous and included with Google Chrome?

  • Answer:

    The most important reason is that Flash Player can only encode live webcam video in the old, inefficient Sorenson Spark codec.

David Bloom at Quora Visit the source

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With due respect to the previous responders; neither of those answers is correct. Google requires plugins for Hangouts/Gmail Video chat because it uses Vidyo's H.264-SVC codec. While SWF can now live encode in H.264 it isn't the layered media appendix that Vidyo uses. Google's roadmap is to use more of the technology they acquired from GIPS, On2 and Marratech and away from Vidyo's SVC.

Rich Griffin

Google, like Apple, has a strong preference for avoiding use of Flash rather than a straight HTML5 implementation. They are so committed to this they have open-sourced the WebM codec for such usage.

JR Holmes

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