Webcam Freezing in Win 10 / 11

Something changed significantly in Windows 10 (compared to Win 7) and many people’s webcams stopped working and, as is typical, few vendors released drivers to support existing cameras for Win 10. There’s a multitude of issues (and resolutions) for webcam issues in more recent Windows versions but this one seemed to work for me.

As an aside. I have around four Logitech cameras that don’t work with various operating systems and my own experience is that Logitech is the worst vendor for supporting peripherals with new drivers (they are infamous for this practice). It’s hard to future-proof when buying any tech so my best advice when buying a webcam is if it works with Linux, there’s a good chance that drivers will be widely available and/or that the webcam’s hardware is decent (i.e. some proprietary driver/software isn’t doing all the processing).

Without going into too much detail, I first noticed webcam issues where it would freeze after a few minutes in OBS. I also don’t really understand the fix but I had to edit the Windows registry at:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows Media Foundation\Platform

If there isn’t a key present, add EnableFrameServerMode as a DWORD and set the value to 0.