What process uses my camera (Macbook)

Question

How to detect what process uses my cam on MacOS? I get an error when I want to take a photo:

DVFreeThread - CFMachPortCreateWithPort hack = 0x206fde0, fPowerNotifyPort= 0x206fd30
FATAL: setting data channel failed - cam busy/not connected ?

Answer 1

I hate to admit it, but I spent quite a bit of time working on a (AFAIK) still unreleased product that was attempting to determine this same process information.

Apple makes some information available via the AVCaptureDevice class, such as the "inUseByAnotherApplication" property, but I believe this only works if the device is being used exclusively by an application (and in most cases, one single camera can feed data & frames to multiple applications at a time).

This still doesn't give you what you really want, the process id(s) of the other apps using your Macintosh camera.

And I don't think Apple is going to give that information up easily, as this bumps up against a combination of Apple's privacy and "sandbox" philosophies: Apple wants applications to play in their own sandbox and not to be aware of anything regarding other applications.

I would recommend filing an enhancement bug with Apple at http://bugreporter.apple.com. I've already filed one myself ( rdar://9951989 ), but the more developers who ask for this functionality, the more likely it is Apple might provide this to us in future versions of their OS.