Multiple Webcam surveillance within a browser?

I want to create a web application (I am quite good with PHP) that captures webcam shots every 1 minute from different persons that open the application page and sends it vi开发者_运维问答a smthng to the web/ftp server.

I mean PC1, PC2 and PC3 opens the web aplication, their webcam it's opened and it captures images every 1 minute so PCSERVER should be able to see the persons behind the webcam "realtime".

I read about Flash Video Server (hope I am quite around the words) but it's purchasable solution and I want to redistribute the application freely.

Any ideas how should I do this?

EDIT: If I am required to learn another programming language such as ActionScript, I don't mind, but if I am going to learn that, it should resolve my problem.

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For video capture and video sharing, you need something like Adobe's Flash Media Server or the open source alternative Red5, that Johni mentions, but since you say you only need "shots every minute", not video, it could also be done without a streaming media server, only the Flash based client and PHP on the server.

What you could do instead of video is capture bitmap images from the web camera, using Flash/ActionScript, encode that bitmap image as JPEG or PNG and upload the image to the server by POSTing it to a PHP page.

It would require more code that fits in a SO Q&A, but you can easily find examples for the different steps of the process - access the web cam - get bitmap image - encode bitmap - POST encoded image top PHP from ActionScript.

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The Red5 Media Server is a good open source alternative to the Flash Media Server: http://red5.org/

It is programmed in Java.