Featured in this episode of Tech News of the Week
So. Fun fact. With OSX, if you want to use an SLR (or likely any number of mirrorless) camera as a webcam, you can’t just plug in the USB. You need to use a passthru webcam utility that is available from your camera’s manufacturer. These are usually named something creative, like “Webcam Utility.” Great.
You still won’t be able to use it in the built-in Photo Booth app, but that’s just because Tim Apple hates you.
ANYWAY. This is annoying but usually not a big deal. Up until the most recent version of OSX Sonoma, 14.1. With these updates, all older versions of webcam utilities that do not comply with the “modern camera extension replacement” will stop working.
I do get the idea- the ‘modern’ version runs sandboxed as an actual much-more-secureable System Extension, and not just a hacked-together-sort-of-a-driver DAL plugin. In the support article on the matter, Apple rather sassily mentions it’s been available for at least two major versions of OSX. If your camera’s manufacturer hasn’t updated yet (Nikon and Canon, I’m looking at you), you have to boot into recovery mode and disable some stuff.
Here’s to hoping the manufacturers get their shit together and update their utilities for the first time in what looks like three years.