Surface Book Cameras exhibiting green tint and slow frame rate when used by desktop applications for Video Conferencing.

Question

When I attempt to use desktop applications for video conferencing such as Zoom Meetings or BlueJeans Video Conferencing, the camera shows a green tint and the frame rate is super slow. This is also true of the Microsoft Camera Rear. Same behavior is seen after disabling Microsoft IR Camera from device manager. 

Using the NVIDIA High-Performance Graphics processor for those applications cause them to crash. So I have those applications set to default to using the "Integrated Graphics" via the NVIDIA Control Panel. So the applications seem to be having issues with the Intel HD Graphics 520.

Intel HD Graphics driver version is 20.19.15.4463

Microsoft Camera Front driver version is 30.15063.10999.4731

This behavior is seen on multiple (30+) machines.

Answer 1

We appreciate the information. We suggest you look into disabling hardware acceleration to see if there will be changes. Doing this may keep the desktop applications from crashing as the setup will utilize the CPU instead of your graphics card alone. We suggest you seek advanced assistance in performing this by sharing your post in TechNet. The IT Pro audience in the said forum will also be able to give you other options to resolve the problem. Go here to get advanced suggestions from TechNet users.

We're here if you have other concerns.

Answer 2

Hi,

The Surface devices may be exhibiting the problem because the firmware or drivers are not fully compatible with the applications. See if updating the firmware and drivers will resolve the problem. Get the latest firmware and drivers for your Surface Book from this page.

Tell us how it turns out.

Regards.

Answer 3

I downloaded the latest set of drivers and I already have the latest set of drivers and firmware for the devices.

The Intel HD Graphics 520 Integrated graphics card is already on version 20.19.15.4463 which is the latest available from Microsoft for the Surface Book. When I go directly to Intel's website and run their software update utility to detect Intel firmware that needs upgraded, the only software it suggests to upgrade is the AVStream Camera 2500 but after downloading that driver, the dialog box said that the driver was generic and there is a customized driver already installed on the device

"Error: A customized computer manufacturer driver is installed on your computer. The Intel® Driver & Support Assistant is not able to update the driver. Installing a generic Intel® driver instead of the customized computer manufacturer driver can cause technical issues. Contact your computer manufacturer for the latest driver for your compute"

The download website of current drivers from Microsoft says the latest version of firmware for the NVIDIA card is 21.21.13.7667 but there is a newer one available from NVIDIA's website directly so I also manually downloaded an updated driver for the NVIDIA GeForce 965M (Version 388.13 or 23.21.13.8813) to update from the previous driver (version 21.21.13.7667) and still experienced the same crashing with the NVIDIA card.

The Microsoft Camera Front firmware is version 30.15063.10999.4731 and is already the latest available from Microsoft. 

So basically all the firmware from Microsoft is up to date and the drivers that are newer than Microsoft's "Approved" firmware/drivers don't solve the problem.

Answer 4

Hi my name is Ximena and I am having issues with opening apps, the camera and recognization of face, and the sound too. my computer was working perfectly fine last night but when i turned it on today it wasn't working property please help

Answer 5

So the issue ended up being identified as a registry key that IT had previously set for Windows on VM for Macs where Macs didn't recognize camera hardware after Windows updates. So once we did an "Undo" of this registry key for Surface Books the camera worked fine. This is highly specific to our corporate network environment so it's unlikely to be the cause of this issue for others, but for reference, the registry keys were:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows Media Foundation\Platform]

"EnableFrameServerMode"=dword:00000000

[HKEY_LOCAL_Machine\SOFTWARE\WOW6432Node\Microsoft\Windows Media Foundation\Platform]

"EnableFrameServerMode"=dword:00000000

and we changed "=dword:00000000" to "=-" and the issue was resolved.