I’m wondering if anyone has figured out a way to duplicate the Chatroulette video chat script yet.
Many are selling their versions, but it can’t be that hard to replicate for those of us that wish to kick it around and test on our servers.
Any savvy programmers figure this out?
The hard part is that you need to set up a Flash video server for the streaming. That’s non-trivial. The script itself isn’t too complicated, you can probably figure it out reading Adobe tutorials about connecting to webcams.
You could test http://www.videowhisper.com/?p=Joomla+Chatroulette+Clone that is easy to install on Joomla and can be run in free mode (10 or 15 minutes sessions - then reload works starting a new chat).
It also requires a flash server and you can use the free Red5 server for that.
http://code.google.com/p/red5/
There’s also a stand alone edition for that chat roulette. It works with Facebook login but that’s a little harder to install (you also need to import sql structure, setup a .htaccess, setup a Facebook application).
The interesting thing about chatroulette from a technical perspective is that it uses Adobe stratus p2p streams - which eliminates the need for any form of streaming infrastructure whether FMS or Red5 or whatever. The initial handshake is handled by an adobe web service then the streams pass directly between clients without routing through any server. You’d still need to have some primitive logic to handle queuing of clients and ‘introduction’ but you don’t need heavyweight bandwidth or server streaming software.