M1 13” MacBook Pro Webcam Flickering

Thanks 40DOMI. However Apple are clueless. I had a MacBook Pro from March 2020, and it worked perfectly fine. This new M1 MacBook Air has the Flickr.

Same light source :-) And you’re right that it doesn’t happen in natural light or candescent lightbulbs. The 50hz/60hz problem happens with halogen and LED lighting only.

But with the early 2020 MacBook Pro’s and before it worked fine. The issue is just the M1 chip macs.

So I hope a software fix comes soon.

Furious having finally been convinced to give up an early 2014 MacBook Air i5 which handled most programmes without much issue, to this upgraded heap of rubbish that can’t cope with a few LED lights. Might have an M1 chip but can’t run a basic video call, doesn’t like Google meet... never regretted purchasing a new Apple product before. Am now!

I have the same camera issue with my M1 Air. I found next workaround in order to make it work properly.

It seems that it is happening due to LED light pulsing. But not all of them causing flickering. I have changed LED lamps (which was 5 years old) in my room and flickering has gone. Seems that modern LED lamps has a less pulsing.

Anyway it's ridiculous that my old 2014 Air works absolutely fine with the any light sources and the brand new M1 Air needs such tweaks and tricks. It would be great if we as an early adopters can get a clear answer from Apple about this issue.

Thank you very much, sles5 ! I installed OBS and followed the steps that you mentioned. For me as well, setting it to FPS=25 in OBS got rid of the flickering black lines in my video/FaceTime calls.

Most likely, 25 works since that is a "perfect-divider" / "perfect-multiple" of 50. Due to which, the sampling rate is "out-of-sync" of 60 Hz .. and thus, the black lines problem goes away.

For instance, I still have the problem if I set OBS to 30 FPS.

Looks like it is working for majority of video conferencing apps except FaceTime. This seems related: https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/issues/3967#issuecomment-751130735: FaceTime, like most other macOS system apps, does not support virtual cameras.

I think the problem is far simpler, the FPS is set at 30, the flickering stops when you use OBS software at 25 FPS, the problem is Face Time will not work with OBS...I have left 2 feed backs already and also with tech support, it seems apple have known about this problem since they changed the camera’s in 2018 or at least that’s what the tech support told me and it’s normal with LED lights

...

but the latest 11.3 brought back the problem! Apple engineers you are incredible!!!