Out of nowhere, when I plug this webcam in, a small volume (NOT the media bar) control pops up in the top LHS of my screen. It overdraws what is beneath and forces the volume to 100. It seems impossible to get rid of - even surviving a reboot. The only way to remove it is unplug the webcam.
Loads of totally useless "advice" on the web including 20 minute videos, none of which addresses this issue.
Curious if any Windownistas could suggest a fix.
Trying to update drivers etc doesn't work. Nor does uninstalling and reinstalling.
Using the SysInternals Process Explorer (it's official Microsoft) drag the crosshair icon onto the unwanted pop-up, it'll show you what process is producing it, you can right-click that process and use properties to see where it is on disk ... report back.
I have a little-used W11 on the cooker right now, and plugging in the webcam does not cause an audio box to pop up. In fact, the OS seems entirely uninterested in the audio from the webcam.
There are "permissions" for applications to be able to capture video from a webcam or audio from a webcam. So that can gate off the usage of the item when it is plugged in. This is similar to how smartphones have permission controls for various things. Previously, Windows did not have such affectations. WinXP did not care who or what used a webcam.
If you installed VLC, you would go into W11 Settings, perhaps in the Apps section, and see if there are camera permissions you should be turning on.
In a Zoom session, you could use the audio from the webcam, or you can select the audio channel on your HDAudio chip for input. I use a separate microphone from the webcam, for reduced noise level. In this particular instance, I did not mess up the audio settings, because I suspect I have another long-term experiment running there.
If the built-in Camera.App is not to your liking, you could get a copy of VLC and see if it has an interface for a webcam. Other than that, there are several versions of AMCAP, and one of them (from the BTTV developer perhaps), is actually good enough to use. AMCAP was originally written by Microsoft as a demo application of the win32 persuasion long ago. One developer put enough effort into AMCAP, to charge money for it. The BTTV version is free.
FrameServe was added to W10/W11, and it is an intermediary. Presumably the intention was, to serve a single webcam, to two or more programs at once. But it also causes some software to fail. In Windows 7, my camera runs at 1600x1200. In Windows 11,
960*X is about it for resolution. Consequently, if Zoom still works in Windows 7, then windows 7 is what I would use. Even if certain resolutions are not practical, I like to feel the money spent on the webcam was not wasted. If every webcam is to be converted into a "$10 loser camera", it would hardly be useful to be spending $300 on a webcam. It would be a $290 dead loss.
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Note that, if a USB device is a composite device, it can have a CD-like read-only virtual volume, which installs a driver via autorun. This is more popular with some other kinds of USB devices, and it is not typical of how a webcam might work.
If you need to gather some information from the USB webcam, USBTreeView can do that for you. Downloads are at the bottom of the page.
formatting link
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If you install VirtualBox on Windows 11, you could use the USB passthru to pass the webcam to the Guest OS in a VirtualBox session. This is one way to avoid bad behaviors in your daily driver OS. FrameServe does not get a sniff of the camera, when the camera is in passthru.
My guess is that the webcam includes something that pretends to be a USB 'media keyboard' which has volume +/- buttons on it. Maybe there are physical volume buttons on the webcam, which can be used to control the system volume, and perhaps one of them is stuck down. Result would be a continuous stream of 'volume up' keypresses which Windows interprets to set your volume to max.
If there aren't physical buttons on the camera, maybe it has 'helpful' volume control features somewhere in its UI (if it has any such).
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