Using Coviu with a Terminal Server

When a Remote Desktop solutions or Citrix is not exposing a camera

This article is a bit technical, so if you're having issues with your Webcam and you're running a terminal server, you might want to point your tech support at this article.

When you're running a Web browser inside a terminal server, you will need to make sure to make the local webcam available to the server on which the Web browser is running. But even if you have made that connection, you can sometimes still run into trouble.

This is an example case from a customer. They used Windows Server 2008R2 as the terminal server, and Windows 7 as the client with Remote Desktop. Then they used Terminal Works TS Webcam to make the local webcam available to the server.

When running Google Chrome inside the Windows Server 2008R2, it wasn't able to discover the Webcam. This was because TS Webcam was not exposing the camera correctly in all the different DirectShow capture filters.

There are two ways to fix something like this:

1.  Use a different remote webcam solution.

We tested one by FabulaTech and it worked correctly, and Chrome was able to capture the video correctly.

2.  Use a camera multiplexer.

If using TS Webcam is required to be used, using something like ManyCam worked. You can run this in the Remote Desktop session, and will be able to grab the TS Webcam input and make it available as a compatible video source for use in browsers.