Accessing Camera crashes Parallels Desktop

A

AshayC

Bit poster
I have been trying for about a week now to get my MacOS Guest VM working with Parallels Desktop and have finally narrowed down the issue but do not know how to resolve it.

Symptoms:
When opening any app that uses the camera like Zoom or Photo Booth, the Parallels Desktop app will crash (on the host side).

I have tested two different USB webcams, same issue on both of them (plugged into different USB controllers).

Finally I realised the source of the issue. I created a fresh VM with Parallels Desktop and reinstalled MacOS from scratch and before installing Parallels Tools, I opened photo booth, and it worked perfectly! Barely a minute after that, I installed Parallels Tools, and after rebooting same issue restarted.

I cannot even avoid installing Parallels Tools because otherwise it is extremely choppy and unusable irrespective of what resources I allocate to the VM. Absolutely any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance!
 
Sort by date Sort by votes
UPDATE - RESOLVED !!
I could get an external webcam successfully on Parallels. Here's what I did.
  1. Created a New Windows 11 VM. Followed this blog : https://www.parallels.com/blogs/windows11/
  2. Installed ZOOM and tried accessing the webcam
  3. This time, got a Windows BSOD - with some USB Drivers STOP CODE. Surprisingly Parallels did not crash. This gave me some confidence that maybe Windows 11 will handle it, with some tweaks.
  4. Then I made this change - My webcam (Logitech c925e) was earlier connected through a USB C hub to my MacBook. I unplugged it from the hub and connected it directly to the MacBook to a free USB-C port (used a USB-C to USB-A dongle since my webcam is a USB-A webcam)
  5. And after this - Lo and Behold !! It works all fine. Could use the webcam on the Win11 VM normally like a webcam - on zoom, google meet, etc.
Hope this helps !
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top