Only One USB Port Working

[ZManSwim]

I'm running into an issue where only one of my USB ports will work with OBS, meaning I can't have a two-camera setup. I previously ran two cameras out of multiple USB ports but now when I try and connect into any of my Macs other USB ports it is like the camera isn't connected. If I try and use a USB hub out of the one USB port that works, that doesn't work either. I went into my USB controller settings and didn't see any issues/errors there. Can anyone help me get multiple cameras working, or suggest how I might better troubleshoot? Thanks in advance!

 

[AaronD]

A USB controller can only support one good video source reliably, because the data rate for that is more than half of the total available. If you could get two acceptable before, on the same controller, then consider yourself lucky to have gotten that much out of it - that they could degrade by enough to fit, and not look *too* bad. There might have been a security patch at some point that prevented you from getting hacked...and also killed the ability to degrade gracefully like that.

Note that this is per *controller*, not per port, because a lot of systems have internal hubs to connect a bunch of ports to the same controller. No different from an external hub.

If you do happen to have two USB controllers, that BOTH have external ports, then you can allocate your cameras accordingly, and that should work. Otherwise, your *reliable* limit is just one. Yes that's annoying!

 

[AaronD]

If you have a PCIe slot, then that's a better way to go anyway. There are several good 4-input cards to choose from.

Just make sure you don't get one that's designed for security systems, that has only one converter (the expensive part) and a quick-and-dirty switch to connect it to one input at a time. Make sure you get one that actually has a dedicated converter for each input, and that all of them work simultaneously. Plenty of data rate on PCIe to do that! But not on USB.