In this paper, we propose a system for video-based cooking communication that allows a home cook to learn cooking by communicating with other skilled cooks or friends over the internet. Because users will want to concentrate on cooking rather than the process of communicating, it is desirable to include multimedia technologies in the system, such as video summarization, to support communication. Our proposed multimedia processing platform for video-based cooking communication, "IwaCam", includes software to enable video-based communication and functions to access raw video and audio. Researchers are only required to implement multimedia processing as a plugin to support communication. We also present simple plugins. In addition, we tested IwaCam with them in home kitchens. Our platform is friendly to both researchers and users in several aspects. © 2012 IEEE.