Webcamgate Was My Fault

Several years back, Microsoft launched a widely-mocked marketing campaign in which PC users claimed that “Windows 7 was my idea.” In the same spirit, I’d like to formally apologize to Windows 10 users. Because Webcamgate was my fault.

Webcamgate is the name I’ve given to the recently-reported problem with the Windows 10 Anniversary Update, where upgrading has broken millions of webcams from around the world. Hey, I’m a writer.

If you watch Windows Weekly or What the Tech, you may recall that over a period of about three months this year, I had problems with my webcam: Each time I connected via Skype, the video would freeze after about 10 seconds. If you use Skype, you may know that this the time at which a video call switches from SD (standard definition) to HD, in my case to 1080p, since like most podcasters, I use a Logitech C920 webcam.

Troubleshooting kicked in. Hey, I’m a geek.

My initial inclination was to believe that Intel’s Skylake chipset was at fault. That may seem like a strange culprit in retrospect, but remember that I’d been using a Skylake-based NUC for most of the year (still am) and that I am privy to some very serious issues between Windows and Skylake. Issues that were so serious that Microsoft initially refused to support Skylake on Windows 7/8.x. Issues so serious that they undermined the launch of the Surface Book and Surface Pro 4, the first Skylake-based PCs.

For the NUC, I went with Skylake against all reason and common sense. This is, after all, a desktop PC, mini though it may be. So while Skylake offers some modest power management savings over previous-generation chips, I should have simply went with a NUC based on one of those previous-generation chips. But I didn’t, because the alure of the new is strong. Hey, I’m a nerd.

My initial NUC experiences were mostly very positive. And I remain a fan of this device type, and of its mini form factor. But I’ve had issues. Not me. I mean, the NUC.

So here’s the kicker. Check out the article BYOPC: Expanding the Intel NUC and Troubleshooting a USB Problem, which was written in mid-May. In it, I write the following:

“Twice now, I’ve used the Intel Driver Update utility to upgrade the NUC with the latest drivers. And each time I’ve done this, video (via a USB-based Logitech HP Pro C920) has stopped working in Skype. Since I record two podcasts each week, this is a problem.”

Yes, that’s right. I experienced Webcamgate as far back as early May. Hey, I’m an idiot.

Well, not completely. “I’m not 100 percent sure it’s Intel’s drivers, I guess,” I wrote at the time. “But I’m pretty sure: When I use the stock Windows 10 drivers (which, yes, of course come from Intel as well), everything works fine. When I use the Intel Driver Update Utility to update the drivers, USB video stops working.”

So, yes, I blamed Skylake. I blamed Skylake because Skylake was the source of everything that was wrong with my world in the first half of 2016.

But then I received new information.

In early June, I built a gaming PC for my son. Before this, he had been using an older HP tower PC of mine, with an older Intel Core i7 CPU. With that PC sitting idle, I decided to clean it out—literally, I dismantled it and used water—reinstall Windows, and see if I could just use that instead of the NUC, since it seemed unable to work reliable with what I thought of at the time as “USB-based video.”

There was just one problem. The video froze on this PC too. So it wasn’t just Skylake. (I had previously tested with Surface Book and Surface Pro 4, and had the same freezing issues when using the C920.)

Naturally, I turned my attention to Skype. Which has been the source of everything that is wrong with my world over the past several years. Hey, I can point the finger as easily as anyone.

The problem with blaming Skype, of course, is that there’s no solution. There’s no Skype setting I can tweak that will magically make Skype start working properly. You just have to pray in the direction of Redmond, sacrifice a goat, and hope for the best. Hey, I just found religion.

But the thing is, I really do like the NUC. Quite a bit. So even though the old HP tower was all cleaned up and presentable, and moved back to the NUC. I reinstalled Windows 10 several times, changing minor things each time to see if I could isolate the problem. And then something interesting happened.

I can’t recall exactly when—late June? early July?—but at some point I simply ignored the notification that pops up in Windows 10 about two days after a clean install that asks you to finish a driver install for connected hardware. This notification regards the Logitech web cam, and it always does the same thing: A Logitech wizard runs, it finds no new hardware, and then it goes away.

There’s just one thing. In ignoring this notification, Skype video just kept working. It was like I had solved the problem. Because I had. Hey, maybe I really am a genius.

(OK, not really.)

So this is the interesting bit. We now know that Webcamgate—again,writer—is actually caused by the Windows 10 Anniversary Update. Which of course I have been running in pre-release form all year. Hey, I’m a numbnut.

(There you go.)

We know that some well-meaning engineer at Microsoft silently turned off H.264 support for webcams using Skype because who the fricks knows why, and that the reason this breaks things is that when the webcam does the switchover to 1080p about 10 seconds in is when it switches to using H.264. We know that Rafael Rivera has found the Registry change and has issued a fix.

But here’s the thing.

For the past month or more, I’ve been using the NUC, and Windows 10 with the Anniversary Update, and Skype, and my video never freezes. Simply by avoiding running that Logitech wizard, I’ve solved the problem. And I’ve done so on multiple machines. Hey, I believe in the scientific method.

I can’t explain that. Computer science remains, as ever, black magic.

But I also can’t explain why my brain never made the transition to the Windows 10 Anniversary Update. I blamed the NUC and its meager USB resources. I blamed Skylake. I blamed Skype. But I never thought to be blame the Anniversary Update.

Webcamgate was my fault.

So I’m sorry. I’m sorry I let you all down, the millions of people who were impacted by this issue. We could have solved the problem, together, if I had just put my petty anti-Skylake biases aside and jumped instantly to the real problem. Which is of course the unmitigated disaster that is the Windows 10 Anniversary Update.

OK, that’s a bit over the top. Hey, I can do hyperbole as well as the next blogger. And I’m only sort of kidding: The real problem here is that Microsoft’s vaunted telemetry and testing processes didn’t identify this as a serious issue months ago.

But I can’t apologize for Microsoft. All I can do is wish I did more. And try to do better the next time.

Hey, I’m human.