USB camera fails to Work in virtual machines

Products

• VMware Desktop Hypervisor

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:

• USB camera works on the ARM Mac host machine, but fails on a virtual machine
• When a USB camera is attached to a virtual machine, it gets detected in guest operating system as VMware Virtual USB video device

Environment

VMware Fusion Pro 13.x

VMware Fusion Pro 12.x

VMware Fusion Pro 11.x

VMware Fusion Pro 10.x

VMware Fusion Pro 9.x

VMware Fusion Pro 8.x

VMware Fusion Pro 7.x

Cause

Starting from Fusion 7, VMware support Virtual USB camera. This allows the physical camera (USB or built-in PCIe FaceTime HD) to be shared by both the host and the virtual machine at the same time. This feature works for most of the USB cameras.

 

The virtual USB camera will try to open a stream on the host camera and render the video stream to the guest. By default, virtual machine uses virtual camera, and the pass-through of USB camera is blocked.

Resolution

Certain cameras may not work well with virtual USB camera. Perform these steps to enable pass through of cameras in to virtual machine:

1. Ensure to shutdown all virtual machines and quit VMware Fusion if its running.
2. Open Terminal ( /Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app)
3. Run this command to change the current location.
   
   cd ~/Library/Preferences/VMware\ Fusion/
   
   
4. Open the preferences file using vi or nano editors in terminal
   
   vi preferences
   
   
5. Add this parameter at the end of the file:
   
   vusbcamera.passthrough = "TRUE"
   
   
6. Save and close the preferences file.
7. Launch VMware Fusion and startup your virtual machine.
8. Click Virtual Machine menu > USB and Bluetooth Setting
9. Select the Camera you want from the list to connect it to the virtual machine.