spesmilo / spesmilo/electrum

Virtual webcams prevent Electrum open real webcam on Win10

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Dominant language
Python
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Description

I had some old abandonded virtual cams (personify and snapchat) configured on my Win10 machine.

Anything in Electrum that was supposed to open webcam would fail :

"Cannot start QR scanner: initialization failed", "Make sure you have a camera connected and enabled"

I thought it was a hardware issue. But then it worked fine in tails with the the same hardware so I looked more closely at the Win10 webcam config. When I realize there were unused virtual cams I removed them, and then Electrum worked fine.

Therefore, suggest that Electrum need a way to notice there are multiple cams - some of which may not be working - and offer a choice of which one to init.

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First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start by reproducing the QR scanner failure on Windows 10 with abandoned virtual cameras such as Personify or Snapchat installed, then compare behavior after removing them. Trace the webcam initialization path used by Electrum's QR scanner. Done means Electrum can identify multiple cameras, let the user choose one, and successfully initialize a working camera.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
python
Domain
desktop
Issue type
Bug
Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
38/100

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