Anyways, Turkey Day is coming up again, and there’s demand to do another time lapse recording of the event. Therefore I had some incentive to fix the problem once and for all.

isightcapture was failing to acquire an image and was simply returning the following:
Fylgia:Desktop james$ isightcapture out.jpg
Bus error


When I ran EyeSight fortunately I got the option to generate an error report and here’s where I saw something interesting:

i.e. there’s some QuickTime component installed that I vaguely remember installing but can’t remember why:
Fylgia:Desktop james$ locate CamCam
/Library/QuickTime/CamCamX5.component
/Library/QuickTime/CamCamX5.component/Contents
/Library/QuickTime/CamCamX5.component/Contents/Info.plist
/Library/QuickTime/CamCamX5.component/Contents/MacOS
/Library/QuickTime/CamCamX5.component/Contents/MacOS/CamCamX5
/Library/QuickTime/CamCamX5.component/Contents/Resources
/Library/QuickTime/CamCamX5.component/Contents/Resources/CamCamX5.icns
/Library/QuickTime/CamCamX5.component/Contents/Resources/CamCamX5.rsrc
/Library/QuickTime/CamCamX5.component/Contents/Resources/English.lproj
/Library/QuickTime/CamCamX5.component/Contents/Resources/English.lproj/InfoPlist.strings
/Library/Receipts/boms/com.b-l-a-c-k-o-p.CamCamX5.pkg.bom


CamCamX is a 6×2 video mixer. Use it to create LIVE TV webcasts using only your Mac, iSight, pictures and movie files. Since CamCamX virtualizes the webcam (iSight camera) in your Mac you can use all your favorite cam applications AT THE SAME TIME. CamCamX also makes non-Apple webcams iSight compatible (via emulation).

That definitely sounds like something that could be causing the problem, and sure enough, upon deleting the component isightcapture now ran but generated a new error:

Fylgia:Desktop james$ isightcapture -t png output.png
[000:000] Error(magiccammac.cc:265): MagicCam 0: MagicCamOpen: Not an allowed process!
[000:000] Error(magiccammac.cc:265): MagicCam 1: MagicCamOpen: Not an allowed process!


I figured it might be some other QuickTime component causing this error as well and noticed these in /Library/Quicktime/

MagicCam 0 and 1, Google Camera Adapter 0 and 1. I’m assuming these are part of the Google Voice and Video Chat functionality I installed a couple of weeks back. Pulling them out of /Library/QuickTime made the error go away but since they don’t stop isightcapture from working I’m going to leave them installed.