Now every new Mac with a built-in display (meaning iMac, MacBook, and MacBook Pro) comes with an iSight. That’s great news for Flash and Flex developers that love integrating webcams into their work. Not only does it grow webcam-enbled Flash as a platform of sorts, but it also puts the best webcam on the market in front thousands of new computer owners.
I’ve got proof that it’s the best, too. Early in my career, I did some research for an Architekture.com whitepaper called “Optimizing Video Conferences with Macromedia Flash Technologies.” Through the course of our research, we discovered that the iSight was the least taxing to CPU performance than any other camera we could find. And more than that, the video quality was worlds better than any other camera we tested. That’s also true of the new, built-in iSights.
Interestingly, we wanted to test everything on the same Pentium 4 machine, but couldn’t find a PC driver for the iSight, so we rigged this weird quasi-driver with The Carnegie Mellon IEEE 1394 driver and a utility called SplitCam. Good Times…
Anyway, I tried to play with a webcam-enabled swf (probably Grant Skinner’s Webcam Fire or something) when I got my new mac and I couldn’t get the built in iSight to talk to FlashPlayer. WTF?
I opened the settings menu, selected “IIDC FireWire Video” from the camera menu and… nothing. I opened up PhotoBooth to test the web cam and then hopped back to Flash. Nothing.
After about thirty minutes of fiddling with this, I decided to try all of the cameras on the menu, just for yuks. I selected “USB Video Class Video [sic]” and presto! My iSight came to life.
So it turns out the new iSight is a USB device now, instead of a FireWire device. You can see for yourself in the System Profiler. Who would have thought?
Moral of the story: When all else fails, try all of the options.
P.S. Still looking for a kick-ass Flash developer.
21 responses so far ↓
Jim Cheng // March 2, 2007 at 9:41 pm
Yup, the new built-in iSights are apparently USB devices. We ran into this on our MacBook Pros here at effectiveUI and I noticed the same thing on my wife’s iMac as well.
Is the IIDC Firewire Video selection showing up as the first camera in the list (e.g. what you’d get if you simply do a Camera.get() call)? If so, this might be bad news and worthy of an Adobe bug report–I suppose you could do a quick check by listing the cameras from AS if you detect that you’re on a Macintosh and then attempt to choose “USB Video Class Video” (sic) specifically, but it’d be best if it “just worked.”
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Andy // July 29, 2007 at 8:14 pm
It is working great. The problem that I have is no other people I can see during chat using Safari. In Opera everything works graeat.
Thanks a lot.
Andy
help with macbook pro isight and flash - MacNN Forums // August 1, 2007 at 7:23 pm
[...] I’m not a Flash developer, but this sounds relevant. [...]
cj // December 8, 2007 at 11:48 am
I have been trying to follow your procedure. I’m not having much luck. I have a MacBook Pro with iSight (purchased about 3 months ago). I see that iSight is listed as USB in System Profiler. I don’t see the choice of camers mentioned. I tried using Safari, Firefox and Opera. Nothing. Updated Flash, nothing. If you could go step by step, I am new to Mac.
Thanks so much.
music // January 30, 2008 at 9:38 am
What do you mean ?
Jimmy // January 30, 2008 at 3:00 pm
I selected the USB option from the dropdown in flash settings. However it made no difference. Flash just isn’t showing my camera. I have tried various flash apps, such as Splashup and Userplane AV chat. It seems flash can’t activate my camera?
Cian // January 31, 2008 at 4:21 pm
Hi, I’m a computer vision developer and I have just upgrade to Mac from XP. I’m working in an 24″ IMac, but for my surprise my work on Action Script and the examples in my web page are not working. I’m working under OS X Leopard and there are no camera settings at the System preferences.
Check out http://www.setianworks.info/WebCamPro5.html please somebody tell me if it does work in your Mac and if there is a solution for me. You could see it working properly in any Windows OS.
Thanks.
Bob Walton // January 31, 2008 at 5:11 pm
Works for me!
lennart // February 16, 2008 at 5:50 pm
Im working on XP on a MacBook Pro and indeed, Cian, it isnt working, AS is not detecting any webcams… If you have an answer, let me know!
Terry Jun // May 14, 2008 at 12:37 pm
i an an answer. After you run your application or swf it will ask you that Flash would like to access the camera, but NOTHING HAPPENS!! So this is what you do. Right click and go to settings. Click on the little camera icon. Then on the drop down select Use USB Class. You will be up and running. Hope this helps.
legal // June 19, 2008 at 8:14 pm
Cool!
Thanks a lot!
Rockets // July 5, 2008 at 4:27 pm
To Bob Walton: and for me
Sander // July 16, 2008 at 9:18 am
Thanks so much for sharing this info! This problem is so tough to solve, because a formerly allright .swf could suddenly no longer work when the configuration outside of the flash-environment has changed for whatever reason.
The bad thing is that the ‘allow/deny’ interaction-box does not suggest you have a choice which source to use. You have to explicitly right-click to find these settings….
I’m very happy to have reached this page, because I almost gave up, seeing just the USB and firewire options listed, of which I only tried the firewire…
voice // October 27, 2008 at 6:49 pm
I’m in the flash player setting and I’ve selected the usb video and i’ve clicked the square window and i see the feed there. I did that and the green light came on to the right of the iSight cam and the feed showed up in the little white box, however when I click close on the setting box the green light for the iSight cam goes out and the feed do not stream to the chat room. HELPED!!!!!
Jack // November 30, 2008 at 4:48 am
Wait? How do you get to the settings menu?
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Nick // February 2, 2009 at 12:43 pm
How do you get to the settings for Flash Player? There not under system preferences not Firefox’s settings. I have Flash 10 installed, but I can’t seem to find it any where.
Thanks
Niels // February 11, 2009 at 12:40 pm
You go to your settings by right click/command click in the flash file.
I tried all the options. FireWire, USB and I even had a DV. But my green light doesn’t even come on. When I try Photo Booth it just works fine. Also the green light.
But I don’t get an image in Flash. Not even on the small ‘test screen’.
Can someone please help me out?!?
Laura // March 2, 2009 at 12:29 pm
Thanks for that – was struggling with it for about an hour! Doh!
Nick // June 15, 2009 at 2:21 pm
Hi guys,
I seem to have some sort of a problem. We are capturing video through browser-based swf. When in MacOSX on my Macbook, captured video is with poor quality – just a few frames caught and sound distorted. This is both in Safari and FF.
Tested it on the same Macbook under Windows Vista and it works fine – video is “normal” quality .
Do you have any suggestions of how to fix the quality of the video capture under MacOSX?
Will K. // July 9, 2009 at 3:41 am
Great for the tip! Eye candy now fully activated