Please, go the simple way, and use (or embed) NetMeeting. This is the short and easy way, and it is quite similar to MS Messenger. I guess the best investment you can make is in getting a webcam with good drivers that do not place a great burden on your CPU by doing all conversion/calculation on the CPU instead of on the camera hardware.

If you really think that creating your own streaming format is a good idea (and I think it's not), please skip VfW, as it is old and unsupported, and look into the DirectX/DirectMedia filter setup. This is what NetMeeting uses though, so in the end you won't be better than NetMeeting, but at least have done it "your way".

If you use the DirectMedia stuff, you will need a language that lets you use COM objects painlessly, which means either VB, C++, Delphi or Inline::CPP (or maybe C#, but I don't know), as Pure Perl dosen't lend itself to painless COM object manipulation unless that particular COM object implements IDispatch (OLE2).

perl -MHTTP::Daemon -MHTTP::Response -MLWP::Simple -e ' ;    # The  
$d = new HTTP::Daemon and fork and getprint $d->url and exit;#spider
($c = $d->accept())->get_request(); $c->send_response( new   #in the
HTTP::Response(200,$_,$_,qq(Just another Perl hacker\n))); ' #  web
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