Since launching 3frames last week, a handful of friends have contacted me about problems getting their webcams to work using Chrome. While I was initially developing it, I tested frequently in Chrome with no problems so it was an unpleasant to find that I too could no longer get the webcam to turn on.

The common link between these friends (and me) is that we all use Macs with built-in iSight cameras. I was sure I’d done everything right in my code so I looked to other webcam-based apps on the web to see if the problem extended to them.

Sure enough, the problem is (was?) widespread. Tumblr’s Photobooth, Chatroulette, and Neave’s Webcam Wall all are currently busted in Chrome using a Mac with iSight.

Aaron Koblin pointed me to a Attraction, a newly launched site for an anime that manages to get around this. Attraction gives you a choice of all the available “webcams” that the driver provides. In Chrome, this list usually begins with “Google Webcam Camera 0” and “Google Camera Adapter 1”. On my computer, Attraction gives me three choices: the aforementioned Google Camera Adapters and in the last slot, my MacBook Pro’s built-in iSight camera (the one I want to use). When I visited attraction, I saw my third option producing a live video feed, so I clicked it and everything is fine!

Now on the surface it would seem that this is just a matter of Chrome defaulting to one of those mysterious Google Camera Adapters rather than choosing the real webcam. As a developer, all you should have to do is search through the available options for the word “iSight” and defer to it, right? For some reason, its not quite that simple.

What does work though is first attaching all of those Google Camera Adapters to Video objects and then attaching the iSight to another Video object. Below is a code snippet that may help you. If you are viewing in the Tumblr dashboard, here is a link to the GitHub Gist page.

I have no idea why the presence of Google Camera Adapters along with an iSight requires this, but it does. AND its important that you do this with both Google Camera Adapters… I have found that it won’t work otherwise. Also, notice how my Google Camera Adapter videos are locally scoped and I never add them to the stage or anything. Presumably they get swept away into the ether of Flash Player garbage collection, but for some reason it doesn’t matter. This is what works!

Hope this is helpful and those webcam apps get fixed quick!