Video Capture Devices not working

K

kevinleeo2

New Member
I installed OBS on 2 windows 10 PC. one desktop and the other on a laptop. they both have 2 webcams installed by USB.
when I go to sources and select video capture devices. none of the cameras show up, they are blank. I tried different USB ports.
I reinstall the program, did all windows updates, rebooted the computers nothing works!!! can you help ??
 
A

AaronD

Active Member
Windows has a camera app built-in. I've forgotten what it's called though - I'm not a Windows user anymore.

Anyway, see if that works. If not, then it's probably something wrong with Windows, or the cameras, or their drivers.

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Another possibility is that you already have them in something else, and Windows is still exclusive with media devices. Historically, that was done for performance reasons, because it takes a fair amount of work on a slow system to copy the single stream from the device into multiple apps, but now that today's hardware can do that easily without noticing, some systems have lifted that restriction. My Linux box has, but according to what I've seen on these forums, I don't think Windows has yet.
 
K

kevinleeo2

New Member
after I turned off the computer for about 10 mins, and tried OBS it started to work !!
why rebooting didn't fix the problem??? thanks for trying to help!!
 
A

AaronD

Active Member
It shouldn't make a difference for the software, since a reboot takes it all down anyway as if it were shutting down, and brings it all back up again from scratch as if it just started.

But it might make a difference for the hardware, or more accurately, the firmware that's running on each device. The only time that *it* gets to reboot is when it loses power, and that only happens when the host turns off, or you unplug the device.

Normally, the firmware shouldn't care how long it's been running, but sometimes some housekeeping or communications requires a running counter of something, and if that counter gets too big, the device can lose its mind. I've seen that happen. It's a hard thing for the engineers to test for, depending on how long it takes for the counter to get that big. A couple of months is not unreasonable.
 
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