Working from home, for most, includes a fair amount of video conferencing. But, what if the camera on your Mac produces No Connected Camera errors and effectively won’t work or has suddenly stopped working with apps like Facetime, Skype, Zoom or Google Meet?
Well, you can either go for a full reboot of your computer, or use a little command line magic.
Time needed: 1 minute.
Restarting the camera on your Mac, Macbook, Macbook Pro, Macbook Air, or iMac works like this:
- Kill all apps that use the camera
Make sure to stop all apps using the camera. I’ve not found this to be a requirement in all cases, but it’s good practise to do so before proceeding.
- Open Terminal app
Open the terminal app on your Mac. You can find it by navigating to your Applications > Utilities folder.
Alternative you can use spotlight (⌘ + Spacebar) and start searching for “terminal”. Of course, if you’ve got the wonderful terminal enhancing iTerm app installed, that will work as well. - Copy killall command
You’ll need to copy the following command into terminal:
sudo killall VDCAssistant - Paste killall command to terminal
Navigate to your terminal app and paste the killall command you’ve just copied
- Confirm command execution
Next up, you’ll need to hit Enter which will prompt you to enter your administrator password for the Mac. Most likely this is the same password as your Mac user account you’re logged in with.
If all went correctly, you’ll see an empty command line prompt again. Same as when you started. - Open camera app again
Open up your camera-using app (Zoom, Skype, Facetime, etc) and activate your camera again. It should now function properly again.
I’ve had to do this so many times that I’d figure I’d document how to do it properly. Hope this helps you too!
Als je het zo vaak moet doen, moet je er een workflow van maken! (of als je @alfredapp hebt, een script/plugin) #tip
Ja, is ek sa. En Alfred haw ik, dus sil dy ekstra stap ek dwaan. Goeie reminder!
ik ha der nea lêst fan, oars hie ik sels wol dien
Thank you so much! Restarting my computer is such a pain. This really helped.
Very nice. I added this to my .zshrc
alias camera=”sudo killall VDCAssistant” # restart the camera
so now I can just type camera to run it
Good tip if you’re familiar with aliases, yes.