My FaceTime camera is not working in El Capitan (Thunderbolt Display)

Thanks so much man...🙂

This helped me! For some reason I can't click on the thingy to confirm (clearly I'm technologically savvy); but that did indeed fix my camera issue.

THANK YOU, YOU ROCK!

After bashing my head against this issue for days with a new MacMini and Apple Retina display, trying various combinations of the Terminal command (sudo killall VDCAssistant) and resetting SMC, I stumbled over the El Capitan 10.11.5 Combo Update installer and decided to try it, even though I was already at 10.11.5.

Surprisingly, it allowed me to install, but there was no immediate success. As it always had, the sudo killall VDCAssistant command still came back with "Process not found"

Today, sudo killall VDCAssistant worked - and the computer now sees the camera!

Download OS X El Capitan 10.11.5 Combo Update

I got a message saying: No matching processes were found.

I didn't need to use Terminal to fix this problem. Simply open either FaceTime or Photo Booth. In FaceTime, click the Video menu and choose the Thunderbolt camera. In Photo Booth, click the Camera menu and do the same thing. After I turned it on in one, it was on in both.

For those of you not comfortable with Terminal, an alternative is to launch Applications > Utilities >Activity Monitor, enter vdc in the search box , select and kill the VDCAssistant process (click on the X in the upper right corner of the window to Quit it).

This fixed worked for me on my Laptop display. Thanks.

Thanks! Worked for me too with my Thunderbolt Display and my MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Late 2013) running macOS Sierra (Version 10.12.1).

I keep having this problem... The "Sudo Killall" process works, but I keep having to do it every couple days. Come on Apple, this is brutal! What is the real problem, and the real fix??

I agree...same thing for me. The issue reoccurs. Another way to do it is to go into Activity Monitor and find the process "VDCAssistant" (sort by Process Name). Select it and quit the process by clicking the 'X' in the top left corner.

Regardless, looks like there needs to be a software update. This is a cheap workaround and we should expect better from Apple.

Thanks

same

sudo killall VDCAssistant

Worked for me!!

You can try killing the VDCAssistant left over from other applications by doing the following in your terminal:

sudo killall VDCAssistant