App-Specific Camera Conflicts

Most consumer webcams can only sustain one active connection at a time — a real hardware and driver-level limitation, not a software restriction any individual app could lift. This single fact explains most of what's in this category: Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Discord, OBS Studio, and Skype each run entirely separate code for accessing your camera, independent of your browser and independent of each other, and each app's specific bugs, cached device lists, and hardware-acceleration settings are unrelated to whether the exact same camera works fine somewhere else at the same time.

The practical result is that "my camera works everywhere except this one app" is a genuinely common, coherent symptom — it usually means that specific app's own settings, its own saved device selection, or its own driver-level conflict, not a problem with the camera or your system generally. The standard solution when you genuinely need one physical camera usable by more than one application simultaneously is a virtual camera — software like OBS that holds the real hardware exclusively and re-broadcasts it as a virtual device any number of other apps can independently connect to, sidestepping the single-connection limit entirely rather than fighting it.

Before assuming a specific app is broken, it's worth briefly checking whether the camera works in a plain browser tab first — a working browser test confirms the hardware, driver, and OS permissions are all healthy, which narrows the problem down to that one app's own configuration considerably faster than troubleshooting from scratch.

It's also worth remembering that closing an app's visible window doesn't always mean it has genuinely released the camera — several of the applications covered here are known to leave a background process running that continues holding the lock, which is exactly why a full process check, not just closing a window, is very often the genuinely correct and entirely complete fix on its own.