Hi clever people,

This one has me stumped: I'm building a kiosk for a client. A linux
box that is running a flash page in a web-browser. At some point
during the experience, the flash page needs to display a live video
feed. In Windows, this is a trivial matter. The flash app simply runs
two lines of actionscript:

my_cam = Camera.get();
my_vid.attachVideo(my_cam);

...where my_vid is a video object that has been placed on the stage.
And hey presto, live video is displayed from whatever webcam you might
have plugged in. On my linux machine and the same USB camera, however,
I see nothing but a black box. Now, without a camera plugged into the
linux box, I don't see anything (and neither am I prompted whether I
accept the page to view my camera). This means that the linux box is
seeing the camera, but somehow Flash is not displaying the video
correctly.

I know that this USB camera works on this machine in this OS, because
I can see live video using xawk or gnomemeeting. I know that this
flash app can display video on a machine through that machine's local
camera, because the same Flash app works in windows. Just can't seem
to get the two together.

Here are the specs of my system:

Box: Shuttle PC, firewire card, multiple USB ports, 3.4GHz P4, 1Gb RAM
OS: linux Fedora Core 2
GUI:Gnome v.2.6
Browser: Firefox 1.0Pre
Flash version: 7,0,25,0


Here are some links:

An note about a "black box" appearing in Flash when viewing a local
camera feed (however this refers to the *authoring environment*, and
that is only available on Windows):

http://www.macromedia.com/support/flashcom/ts/documents/blackbox_novid.htm

A link to the test file that should simply echo back your local video
feed (try it if you have a webcam).

http://www.urgelab.com/camera.html

I can, of course, send you the source code, although it's effectively
just the two lines of actionscript that I posted above.

My ultimate goal is to get an Apple iSight doing this, but in the
meantime I'll settle for a USB camera. If you can get this working,
I'll throw more money at the iSight problem. Also infinite respect and
probably a bottle of rather good wine.

Cheers,

Pete