2026-06-09
Dad asked about webcam on his Pi to do video chat with Mum when she travels to Canada. I think on some level we're all anticipating a lot of pain and struggles, since it's a very old webcam, and a pi, and web stuff. However, I my understanding is that this is one of those areas where web standards have got all this solved, and this all should just "work" assuming the pi can see the USB device, but it may require some testing.
There's also the platform side too: I trust the browser will be able to see and manage the webcam, because it's a modern browser, but there's also still the challenge of finding a platform that will let Mum and Dad's webcams find each other. Teams, Google Meet, Zoom, Discord etc. would all be fine, but big tech scepticism, aggressive adblocking, eccentric networking and other similar practical and ideological challenges are traits which I inherited from my Dad, so other options might be needed.
I'm going to take this opportunity to mess around with webcams, and also trystero.
In keeping with markdown notes first, I wonder how much effort it is going to be to be able to just dunk some browser html/js code in here, and have it usable on 1dom.fun...
3 steps:
- test/understand/see what happens with code here.
- quick JS show webcam & audio test
- how quick/easy to throw in Trystero to allow vc to happen here?!
A few hours and some local later, I had to do some small changed to snarkdom to not format the script tag contents, specifically added a tokenizer for script tags, but that's about it.
All worked as expected with regards to HTML/JS in markdown. Although Trystero has been updated since I last used it, including some breaking syntax changes, but nothing unintuitive.
2026-06-10
As expected, the Webcam was really easy to get going on pi/linux. One issue was a loose cable, but after that, lsusb showed the webcam, and webcamtests.com was able to see and activate the webcam.
As also expected, platform side failed. Specifically, discord wouldn't work. Through the webapp on Dad's side, we were getting "error 2015" and the call would cycle through connecting....authenticating...disconnected, whilst suggesting the video won't load.
Poking around, and it looks like the discord webapp wasn't even able to an authenticated webrtc session setup, so it wasn't even getting to the point of enabling the camera. We were able to enable camera and view the feed in Discord web app and settings, but just not make a call.
It could be any number of things, but I'd guess it's either:
- new discord account on Dad's side, maybe not fully verified or activated properly: it was impossible to get any of the age verification approaches to work
- networking setup on Dad's side, he has some older hardware and typically has things like UPnP fairly locked down.
- some background security/captcha type script broken/locked down, causing Discord app to not fully trust Dad.
Other decentralised, non-US-big-tech run options.
- https://chitchatter.im/ (uses trystero)
- https://fairmeeting.net/ (uses Jitsi)
Alternatively, you can use here if you figure out how...