Struggle, I do, using Google Chrome and Google+ Hangouts Chat. My Ubuntu 14.04.2 system simply will not display the integrated webcam, and gives me a black screen instead. Apparently this is a known problem. I was expecting that since both products are from Google, that they would work well together, but this is not the case.
My webcam has always worked. Cheese and GUVcview has always worked from day 1. I recently installed Skype and it worked right from the install. Using Firefox I can go to plus.google.com, login and my webcam works. Strange.
I uninstalled my google-talkplugin and reinstalled it, but this did not solve the problem.
I cannot think of what else to do. I’ll just have to wait until someone at Google fixes the issue. The bug report is clear and many other Ubuntu 14.04 people have the same issue. It took me many tries at Google search to finally find this bug report. Search is still somewhat difficult for some circumstances.
As I have a dual boot machine I rebooted to Win7. Plus.google.com’s hangouts and chat both work on Chrome and Firefox.
I guess my short term solution is to use Firefox when I do a google chat, or barring that I’ll need to use Skype. This is all very frustrating.
