Spoiler alert
Have you found yourself in a situation where you have just got off a google meet conference call on a Mac running MacOS only to find out that the camera no longer works for any other video call application, Face-time or MS Teams? Well it seems either chrome messes with the video plugin or ties the resources down. Only solution I have found other than a full system restart is to kill the VDC.plugin process.
How did I arrive here?
I noticed that sometimes my webcam stops working no matter the application that is trying to utilize it. The FaceTime application also displays an error “camera not found.” Once this occurs, the only way to recover the use of the webcam is a full system restart.
I stumbled upon the root cause by accident. After my Google meet call, I noticed no other application could utilize the webcam other than Google meet.
The fix
Killing the VDC.plugin process fixed the issue without the need to restart the workstation.
- As a start, shut down any applications that have the potential of using the webcam.
- Search for the process ID (PID) utilizing the VDC plugin by running the following command in terminal
macBook% lsof | grep "VDC"Google 87814 txt REG 1,4 424176 1152921500312605247 /System/Library/Frameworks/CoreMediaIO.framework/Versions/A/Resources/VDC.plugin/Contents/MacOS/VDC
Only one VDC plugin process should be left if all applications are closed. - Once the PID has been identified, kill the process by running the following command
macBook% kill -9 87814 - Done, webcam should now function as normal.
Yet another free consult! Feel free to reach out, drop me a tweet or Instagram dm.
akXen.tech
Alpha Cube Tech 