Fix Your Camera in Zoom.us on Mac

tl;dr: `sudo killall VDCAssistant` restarts the camera daemon on Mac hardware

If you work with folks who are distributed you’ve probably had your fair share of A/V issues. At Adorable roughly half of our team is located outside of Madison, WI and we offer everyone the opportunity to work from home if the need arises.

We’ve tried all sorts of tools for team video conferencing over the years:

• Skype
• Google Hangouts
• BlueJeans
• Appear.in
• Meetspace
• Squiggle (now defunct)

Finding something that works well for two people and also for team wide meetings is a tall order. Add in the ability to share your screen and light remote access and few have executed this set of features very well. Zoom.us has delivered reliably for over a year now.

For those of us who plug in external hardware in the form of cameras or monitors one irritant is that cameras do not always appear in the dropdown for hardware in the Zoom UI. Restarting Zoom solved the problem in that it made the camera available. But, it’s often the host who was using the external camera and kicked others out of the meeting.

I don’t recall who amongst the team discovered the solution but, it turns out there was a simple solution.

The daemon that handles cameras on Mac hardware is called VDCAssistant. When you kill the process it is restarted by the OS and in doing so detects devices and the Zoom UI is updated without restarting. Huzzah!