Getting access to media devices

There has been a long history behind trying to get media devices to the browser screen. Many have struggled with various Flash-based or other plugin-based solutions that required you to download and install something in your browser to be able to capture the user's camera. This is why the W3C decided to finally create a group to bring this functionality into the browser. The latest browsers now give the JavaScript access to the getUserMedia API, also known as the MediaStream API.

This API has a few key points of functionality:

• It provides a stream object that represents a real-time media stream, either in the form of audio or video
• It handles the selection of input devices when there are multiple cameras or microphones connected to the computer
• It provides security through user preferences and permissions that ask the user before a web page can start fetching a stream from a computer's device

Before we move any further, we should set a few standards...