How to get your webcam to work in a webchat on a Mac
I tried to get my webcam on my MacBook Pro to work in an online chat yesterday and was stumped. It just wouldn’t work. A quick check with photobooth showed me that the webcam was working fine. A quick check on my windows machine showed me the chat webpage was working fine. So what was the problem?
Turns out it’s a little problem the MacBook has with Flash. It’s standard webcam is on index 2, not 1 as flash generally assumes.
This means as a user:
Choose "USB Video Class Video" in the settings to get your webcam to work on a Mac
- you need to hit the flash player settings by right clicking anywhere on the application and choosing “Settings” in the menu
- then click the little webcam icon
- and change the camera option from “DV Video” to “USB Video Class Video”
Right and there you go, all set and happy..
For developers and programmers, instead of assuming that the webcam is always indexed as 1 when you call the Camera.get() function you can use this little snippet of code to save you and all mac users some hassle:
if (System.capabilities.os.indexOf(“Mac”)>-1){ cam = Camera.get(2); }else{ cam = Camera.get() }Thanks and happy webcaming! :D
