Bleeding-edge browsers have the ability to connect directly to hardware webcams, making it unnecessary to run a Java-based client program to operate your [video spectrometer](/tool/spectrometer). 

To enable the feature in Google Chrome, navigate to [chrome://flags](chrome://flags), scroll down and enable the "MediaStream" entry. You'll have to restart the browser:

<img src="https://publiclab.org/sites/default/files/mediastream-chrome.png" />

###Mobile browsers###

Only one mobile (Android) browser (Opera Mobile) currently supports getUserMedia/MediaStream. It connects directly to the camera of the phone, which is exciting for mobile spectrometry.

###Flash-based fallback###

A Flash-based video capture system is partially implemented, and should soon work for browsers without the MediaStream API.