Hi. I'm looking for a user-friendly technique to capture video data from a user's webcam and send the images to a webserver, offerring a live video stream to other users. I'm running an ASP.NET webpage. However, I want it to be as user friendly as possible, meaning not to require users to install some external application, but rather using an automatically installing IE plugin or whatever. What techniques are there to achieve this? Thank you!

How exactly do you expect a Firefox, Opera, Safari, or Konqueror user to install an IE ActiveX plugin? That wouldn't be very user friendly. :)

I know that Java applets and Flash objects can access the user's web camera in some form, but it might require special authorization by the user. And both of those are cross browser.

You're right and that's why I was asking ;-)

I already checked the Flash capabilities, but the problem is that we would need to buy the Macromedia Flash development software and a Macromedia Media Server license. We would also need to pay the traffic of the Media Server. Alltogether the prices would be busting our budget.

However, I'm interested in the java applet approach, but couldn't find anything on the net. Can someone point me into some direction here?

A user authorization message would be no problem...