Terry Myerson, executive vice president of operating systems at Microsoft, speaks for new Windows 10 products at a media event in 2015. (Photo : Getty Images/Andrew Burton)
Microsoft is receiving some serious negative feedback regarding the Windows 10 Anniversary Update as it led to millions of webcams not working after the installation of the said update.
Skype, one of the most used communication apps across the globe, is even broken by the Windows 10 Anniversary Update. Users find their application freezing whenever they try to open the webcam or initiate a video call with their contacts.
While the update supposedly contains huge improvements and features for Windows 10 users, it seems that it does more harm than good. There have been many users reporting the webcam problem to the official product forum of Microsoft.
Windows 10 Anniversary Update breaks the webcams because it prevents the USb webcams from using MJPEG or H264 encoded streams, ITWire has learned. Only the YUY2 encoding method was allowed which led to the massive freezes and crashes whenever a user wanted to access their webcams through Skype and even Microsoft's own communication apps.
Users have been reporting that they cannot use any of the apps with webcam features because of the Windows 10 Anniversary Update problem. Several business owners are also angry because their clients cannot transact without the MJPEG streams while some developers are ranting that their customers cannot use their apps as well, which could lead to a decline in their profits.
Microsoft has already acknowledged the problem with the webcam streams and said that they are already working on a patch for the Windows 10 Anniversary Update issue, Forbes reported. The goal of the encoding limitation was to let other apps such as Windows Hello access the webcam streams without duplicating to avoid performance issues as well but that seems to have backfired.
Engineer Rafael Rivera has found a temporary fix which involves messing with the Windows registry files. Users have to modify and add a value to the Windows Media Foundation registry file to be able to use their Skype video features after rebooting the computer.
There is no release date or the Windows 10 Anniversary Update resolution for the webcam issue. Microsoft could be developing the fix along with other minor improvements.
