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September 7, 2006

troubleshooting

Here’s a new one: a broken iSight?

Posted Sep. 7, ’06, 2:03 PM PT by Scott Silverman
Category | Troubleshooting

IchatgreenscreenAll was fine and dandy this afternoon. I was leisurely working on my MacBook Pro, when I glanced at my iChat Buddy List to see that three of my MacBook-equipped friends from CA were online. It was the perfect moment for a heartfelt 4-way video conference.

So I did what any other Intel Mac user would do: I clicked the video icon to initiate my conference. Instead of seeing the happy face of my friend Derrick, I was greeted by a scathing iChat message:

Your camera appears to be in use by another application. Please quit any other application that might be using the camera.

“Silly me,” I thought, “I must have left Photo Booth running behind my cluster of windows.” I checked, but no such thing. After quitting every application I had running and restarting my entire system, I was still receiving the same “Camera In Use” message.

So I quit iChat and decided to give Photo Booth a shot. Instead of seeing my tired face staring back at me from my 15-inch screen, I saw an ugly green screen with some digital static dancing around the top (click image for enlarged version). Yikes. A search of Apple Discussions revealed some people with similar problems, but no concrete solution. I guess I’ll be making a trek to an Apple Store in Boston this weekend.


8 Comments

Justin said:

I have had that happen to me, but I have the external iSight so I just unplugged it and plugged it back in and viola! I know you cant do this, but hopefully the apple store guys can help. Which apple store you going to? I bought mine at the chestnut hill mall.

September 7, 2006 2:40 PM
Richard Neal said:

That happened to me as well with my iMac, but a restart made it work just fine.

September 7, 2006 7:46 PM
exnihilo said:

Hey, are you twin brothers with Dustin Diamond?

September 7, 2006 9:39 PM
Scott Silverman Author Profile Page said:

Interesting. My iSight has now resumed working... I don't know what caused that little mishap, but I have a feeling it wasn't the last time I'll be seeing it.

And, no, I'm not twin brothers with Dustin Diamond, but it's funny you should think so. He was born in San Jose, CA, which is only a few miles from where I was raised. I actually get that all the time, though. People always call me "Screech."

September 7, 2006 9:49 PM
Marcus said:

I have an iSight that behaves exactly like that. You plug it in, it buzzes the autofocus and the light comes on, and stays on. Same message, no fix. I tried everything for months: pluggin it in different ways, even on PCs... trying apps etc. It behaves the same also on a PC, that led me to believe there is something wrong with the camera itself, a in stomething wrong with the cameras startup value settings. One thing I found out with the firewire debug utility that is somwhere inside the developers apps, is that it seems to have some wrong values written inside its registers, but I did not find any app or way of reseting those to the proper values. Hence, as you plug it in (no matter where) it's automatically in "use by an application", because that is what it says inside the memory of the camera. THIS SUCKS, APPLE! This is iSight #2 that this has happened. Similar to 2 iPod shuffles I had that simply "go nuts" and stop working and just keep blinking to every input.
:( If you find a solution let me know please, thanks.

September 7, 2006 10:42 PM
Aj said:

I had the same problem but I had gone the whole system reinstall, no help. So I turned my MacBook off for awhile to cool it down a bit. When I came back and turned it back on, the iSight started to work again. Could it be a heat issue?

September 8, 2006 5:59 AM
Cory said:

What would be nice is if someone made a program or AppleScript (neither I'm adept at) to disconnect or turn off the Firewire iSight (internal bus) then immediately turn it back on to prevent the in-use error messages from applications that perhaps 'forget' to stop using the iSight. Or just one to perhaps goose the connection to the iSight to ensure it is indeed in use and if not perhaps free it up (can the API do that if it's already in use by another application?). I've seen the issue at a local store on occasion, not too frequently though. That's with all firmware updates and the like, as well as all other updates via Software Update (and yes, the iSight firmware updaters were actually run and patch the firmware, not just installed and sitting in /Applications/Utilities/iSight Updater 1.0.3/ ;) )

September 8, 2006 3:03 PM
Adam Hansen said:

Apple has a Knowledge Base article addressing this issue.

September 9, 2006 10:40 AM

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