[SOLVED] Camera keeps "turning itself off", not working ?

[seriouslyrobert1]

Ok, so I posted this before and no one answered. It's getting worse so I hope someone can help. My camera has randomly just been going out. I keep having to do a system restore to get it back on. I tried F10 to turn the camera on and off, and it still does nothing, even when on. It's like the camera stays on for a while, then randomly just stops working in the browsers. I don't get it because the camera still works perfectly fine in the camera app, just nothing else! For this reason, I know it's not a hardware issue. It happens once or twice a day now. First time it happened today was after I sat on my wireless keyboard for a second accidentally. Second time was just after I had been using omegle for a while and refreshed to the homepage and tried to go back it. The second time I never touched anything, didn't update anything during or after. It just stops working by itself.

I went on omegle just to check and see if it recognizes and asks for permission, but it doesn't. I used all 3 of my browsers (firefox, chrome, edge) and none are recognizing it. On omegle it says: Error with camera: Requested device not found. When I go into the camera app on the computer, it recognizes it and works just fine. When I checked the antivirus "is your webcam spying on you thing," where it accesses your webcam to see what others see, it wouldn't access it either, and it has before. The only place the cam is working is in the camera app!

I'm running Windows 10 Pro on a Sager notebook.

From what's happening I can't think that it could be:

Camera driver since it's working in the camera app (checked and current)

Out of date browsers (checked all and current)

Antivirus (uninstalled and reinstalled, checked when not on computer, cam still not working)

What else could it be? Just crazy that it would randomly stop working, just on browsers and all apps EXCEPT the camera app. Never heard of or seen anything like this.

Please help, thanks in advance.

 

[Ralston18]

Look in Reliability History and Event Viewer for error codes, warnings, or even informational events that correspond with the times that the camera goes out.

Especially Reliability History: the timeline format may be very helpful especially if there are errors that began after you accidentally sat on the keyboard.

F10 could be damaged....

Do you have another known working keyboard (either wireless or wired) that you can test on the laptop?

And maybe reinstall the camera app. It may be working "within itself" but not working when communicating/working with other apps/browsers.

 

[seriouslyrobert1]

I figured it out after some more googling right after it happened! I only saw it because of someone's comment on a long article.

Turns out disabling my MICROPHONE was causing the error with the WEBCAM, in turn telling omegle that the object could not be found. This makes no sense since the webcam is still on and not disabled...but whatever. At least I figured it out. Now you know if you ever see anyone else ask about it...just enable microphone and it should go right back to working.

Thanks!