In the early days of browser development, capturing live video and bringing it into the browser required Flash. Back then, this project — CamCanvas — offered JavaScript interoperability through a small Flash bridge, allowing developers to grab webcam frames and paint them on a <canvas> element for real-time processing.
As web standards evolved, Flash became obsolete. For nearly three years, this library was frozen, while camera access moved to WebRTC and mediaDevices.getUserMedia(). The Flash approach no longer fits today’s browser environment, and yet, many creative and research-oriented uses of “camera-to-canvas” still matter.
How can we bring back the same creative control — real-time camera capture and pixel manipulation — using pure web technologies? We’ve revived and modernized the original idea with a new JavaScript API based purely on HTML5, Canvas, and WebRTC.
This project is educational, it serves to help developers make sense of features, it helps us to get ideas in the first place, ideas which may support the execution of real-world projects:
- A simple inline JavaScript API to project webcam video directly into a
<canvas>. - Per-pixel manipulation functions (filters such as emboss, gray, inverse, and red).
- Automatic or programmatic initialization via
data-webcam-filterattributes. - 100% client-side — no plugins, no Flash.
This revival exists to preserve and extend the culture of camera-based experimentation on the web: to show that you can still explore, manipulate, and understand visual data locally, in the browser.
Webcam to Canvas JavaScript API 0.2 allowed you to capture webcam images from Flash (.swf) and transfer them into JavaScript for rendering inside a <canvas>. It relied on a small compiled .swf (less than 5 KB), created with Mtasc and SwfMill. Once the webcam image was accessible in JS, developers could manipulate every pixel: filtering, compositing, motion detection — all in real time.
Original intention:
- Cam Gestures: edge/pattern detection experiments
- Image Manipulation: background removal, chroma keying, etc.
Today, this project stands as both a historical archive and a living bridge between the early Flash webcam experiments and modern, privacy-friendly WebRTC development.
MIT License
Copyright (c) 2025 Marcio S. Galli
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the “Software”), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
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