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I was using Skype, and suddenly the internal iSight camera stopped working. It's not the first time this has happened. I already fixed this problem with a reboot, but I would like to find a solution without a reboot. Is there a way to push the driver back, or do some more accurate diagnostic?

I have MacOSX 10.6.7 on a macbook 13" unibody.

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  • "the camera stopped working". What camera is that? The internal iSight or an external Canon camera?
    – Martin Marconcini
    Commented May 16, 2011 at 13:31
  • @marconcini: the internal camera. Disregard my bug report. I then realized it was due to my photo camera, and has nothing to do with the internal iSight (Initially I thought it was just because Canon made the iSight, so it registered as such to the USB driver)
    – Stefano Borini
    Commented May 16, 2011 at 14:01

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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I found out that the camera is taken over, somehow, by the google talk browser plugin. I solved by doing the following. From a terminal, I issued the following command

ps uaxw |grep Firefox

It will show a list of the processes under Firefox. One of them may be something like

sbo      21173   0.0  0.1   414040   2492   ??  S     5May11   0:07.47 
   /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/plugin-container.app/Contents/
   MacOS/plugin-container /Library/Internet Plug-Ins/googletalkbrowserplugin.plugin
   -omnijar /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/omni.jar 21168 
   gecko-crash-server-pipe.21168 org.mozilla.machname.855559451 plugin

I wrapped the long line. I then proceeded to kill this process (the pid is the first number)

  kill 21173

and the iSight started working again.

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Since the error message includes "Canon Digital Camera" I assume that your MBP is connected to an external camera. You can try to eject the device (unplug it from the USB port) and replugin to see whether it helps.

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  • I am referring to the internal camera. Disregard my bug report. I then realized it was due to my photo camera, and has nothing to do with the internal iSight (Initially I thought it was just because Canon made the iSight, so it registered as such to the USB driver). The internal iSight is not working anymore, and I would like to understand why and how to recover.
    – Stefano Borini
    Commented May 16, 2011 at 14:02

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