As I transition to the 2016 MacBook Pro, I’m finding myself enjoying many aspects but disappointed by the maturity of the software on this new hardware base. My latest little annoyance is that the built-in “FaceTime HD” webcam didn’t work. Happily it’s a quick fix, but it’s another disappointment that it didn’t work out of the box!
TL;DR: If your MacBook Pro camera won’t work when called up (in FaceTime, QuickTime, or other applications), just open Terminal and type sudo killall VDCAssistant
For a while, some Macs have had issues with cameras not responding. This has affected some MacBook, Thunderbolt Display, and other machines. And now it’s cropping up with the new 2016 MacBook Pro with Touch Bar.
The issue stems from an issue with a piece of software called VDCAssistant, which has been part of Mac OS X for a few revisions. For some reason, it’s not activating the camera when needed.
The solution is to stop and restart this daemon. To do this, open Terminal and type the following:
sudo killall VDCAssistant
It will ask you to authenticate with your password (sudo gives you administrator privileges) and will then kill and restart the daemon. After this, your webcam should work fine. And you shouldn’t need to do this again.
Incidentally, there is no real error message for this. QuickTime showed an orange triangle sign and black screen but there was no indication of what the issue was. Great work, Apple!