Basic Webcam Handling in Flash CS 3

This post will show you how you can capture a webcam stream in Flash …

But first off all , to make sure the flash settings are correct , check if the same device is pointed out to be the working device as in the image…

Making a new Camera instance and hooking it up with the connected webcam …

var cam:Camera = Camera.getCamera();

Now we will make a new video instance to attach our camera to, and adding this video to the stage (in my example i will add the video instance to a movie clip on the stage)

var video:Video = new Video(320, 240);

//Smoothen your webcam screen

video.smoothing = true;

video.attachCamera(cam);

mcWebcam.addChild(video);

In my example i made it possible to click on my movieclip containing my webcam stream , when done so it captures the webcam stream and includes a little thumbnail of this image in the upper right corner …

To do this i added a event listener to my movieclip that handles the mouse clicking  …

//Event Listener

mcWebcam.addEventListener(MouseEvent.MOUSE_DOWN, clickHandler);

The thumbnail is made out of the bitmap data from our webcam stream , so we first captured this bitmap data from the Video instance, which we then transformed to a Bitmap image … And finally added to the thumbnail movieclip on stage …

//Click Handler
function clickHandler(mevt:MouseEvent):void{
//Create new bitmapdata
var bmd:BitmapData = new BitmapData(320,240);
//Attach the webcam video to the bitmapdata
bmd.draw(video);
//Create Bitmap from the bitmapdata
var myBitmap:Bitmap = new Bitmap(bmd);
mcThumb.addChild(myBitmap);
}

Outcome