tinychat.com

[fcuk112]

has anyone had any success getting tinychat to work with ubuntu? i have a logitech 4000 and an external microphone, neither of which seem to function properly within tinychat.

[3rdalbum]

Hate to be redundant, but... bump! Failures like these are a great embarrassment to linux in the popular eye.

It might be, if anyone used Tinychat.com apart from the three people who posted here

I can use my webcam on other Flash-based websites, but not on this Tinychat. In addition, the error message "You didn't set up your camera" keeps appearing; I can't get rid of it. This is a great embarrassment to Tinychat.com for providing a buggy service.

[to_lazy_to_fix_it_right]

Solution = https://help.ubuntu.com/community/We...nce%20Intrepid


Fixing Webcam issues while using Flash since Intrepid


In Ubuntu Hardy you were used to be asked to grant permission to the website you were visiting to take control on your webcam (through some flash popup with the settings). It seems that recent versions of Adobe flash player (the updated ones for Intrepid and Jaunty since June 2009, at least, and probably before also) have a bug which doesn't ask the user to grant access to a site when visiting it. Like ustream.tv for streaming using your webcam, as example.

The workaround is to grant access to that website by default without attempting to ask you each time.
* You need to go to: http://www.macromedia.com/support/do...manager06.html
* Choose the "Website privacy settings" * Select the site from the list of visited websites. * click on the option "always allow" above the list.
You should see that the icon on the left of that site in the list changes from yellowish to green colour. That's it.
Try again visiting that website, ustream.tv in this example, and your webcam should be streaming again as it used to do back with Hardy.
Enjoy!

[ethos101]

I got it working, cam AND mic. I'll post what I did as a sort of guide. Hopefully more people can find this usefull.

Here's what I did: (after troubleshooting my mic)

1 - Install vloopback device
2 - Install webcamstudio
*steps 1 and 2 details here: http://www.ws4gl.org/installing-on-ubuntu
3 - Add group "video" and put my user in that group (this is the critical part)
Make sure /dev/videoX and /dev/videoY are in the video group:

ls -l /dev/video*

The output should read rw-rw---- root video (bla bla bla) /dev/video0
...root is owner and video is group... good.

Add video group:
The GUI way:

>System>Administration>UsersAndGroups
Unlock > enter root password
AddGroup > video
click video group > properties
check box next to your user name

That should be it. After you install vloopback drivers the loopback device isn't accessible until you add permission for your user to access devices owned by the "video" group. In my case I also had to add the video group.

You can probably tell I'm not a guru but if you have problems I'll try to help.

:edit:
So I just did this on my laptop too. I had to add /dev/video* to the video group for whatever reason. (diff version?)
sudo grpadd video /dev/video*
I also had to restart X server for the useradd to the video group to take effect.

[booyabazooka]

Thanks for the responses.

to_lazy_to_fix_it_right's advice seems to have gotten me past the first hurdle - The permissions problem is taken care of.

My webcam does show up properly in the camera selection screen, but then it turns off when I actually start broadcasting. ethos101, is this what your instructions fix?

[EGadZooks]

Yeah, got the first hurdle out of the way with the permissions, but in tinychat the preview thumbnail of my camera (Logitech QuickCam Communicate STX usbid: 046d:08ad) is wack and broadcasting doesn't work.

Ethos101, I went through your instructions, even created the new group with me as a user, and I dont know how to get tinychat to act any differently. It may be that I dont know what the loopback is for/does or how to use that, whats that all about? Also what are the steps to take to get tinychat (or anything for that matter) to recognize a new 'webcam' source, say if I wanted to broadcast my desktop using webcamstudio.

(also as a side note, if you guys can point me in the right direction regarding getting the microphone that is built into my cam to be recognized that would be great, though I think the only drivers for my cam only work with the video. Another idea would be to run a virtual box with windows, but I dont know how to pass the cam to virtual box)

Thank you in advance :OD

[ethos101]

Thanks for the responses.

to_lazy_to_fix_it_right's advice seems to have gotten me past the first hurdle - The permissions problem is taken care of.

My webcam does show up properly in the camera selection screen, but then it turns off when I actually start broadcasting. ethos101, is this what your instructions fix?

I was getting the webcam video just fine as well but turning off when broadcast starts. What you want to broadcast is the vloopback device. Webcamstudio inputs your webcam and outputs to vloopback similar to how manycam works for windows (hit broadcast and pick manycam instead of your webcam).

I wasn't getting the vloopback device option in output in webcamstudio until I discovered running it as root would automatically detect the output as vloopback. So I put all video devices in "video" group and added my user to "video" group. Now when I start it it uses the vloopback device for output.

Then I started firefox as root and was able to see the vloopback device too. Pick that and broadcast away.

So you see the trick is to get the vloopback device as output for manycam and input for firefox app. I just had to put my user in the same group as the vloopback device and make sure it had group RW permissions. (probably only need R)

@egads: show me what this outputs:
ls -l /dev/video*
then this too:
groups

[cain071546]

this helped me soooooooooooo much



BUMP!

[_____]

Solution = https://help.ubuntu.com/community/We...nce%20Intrepid


Fixing Webcam issues while using Flash since Intrepid


In Ubuntu Hardy you were used to be asked to grant permission to the website you were visiting to take control on your webcam (through some flash popup with the settings). It seems that recent versions of Adobe flash player (the updated ones for Intrepid and Jaunty since June 2009, at least, and probably before also) have a bug which doesn't ask the user to grant access to a site when visiting it. Like ustream.tv for streaming using your webcam, as example.

The workaround is to grant access to that website by default without attempting to ask you each time.
* You need to go to: http://www.macromedia.com/support/do...manager06.html
* Choose the "Website privacy settings" * Select the site from the list of visited websites. * click on the option "always allow" above the list.
You should see that the icon on the left of that site in the list changes from yellowish to green colour. That's it.
Try again visiting that website, ustream.tv in this example, and your webcam should be streaming again as it used to do back with Hardy.
Enjoy!

I did this in 10.10 and it worked for tinychat. Thanks! I also downloaded vloopback for good measure and everything is working.