Friday 27 November 2009

Vaio and Skype

Vaio has some webcam issues when it comes to Skype video calls (or should that be the other way around). Anyway, the problem is that Skype defaults to using a bluetooth webcam, which if you only have the basic onboard webcam, you'll crash Skype.

There has been musings of various fixed beta versions and workarounds, but it turns out you can fix it in 5 seconds. Just do the following (and take backups in case it doesn't work).

1. Find the C:\Users\you\AppData\Roaming\Skype\username\ folder and open the config.xml
2. Change the line
from: <Device>Bluetooth Video</Device>
to: <Device>USB Video Device</Device>

voila, now it doesn't try to access a bluetooth device, so it doesn't crash.

7 comments:

Puma Yui said...

I tryed to do what you told about skype\vaio issues, but it seems i can't change it. Every time i change and save it, deleting the older file, but when i run skype, it goes back to the old configuration. Do you know other way to change it? And to help us, skype's site aren't working, so i can't send a mail asking what to do. =\

trotmaster said...

I can't think of anything I did differently that would make a difference. Do you have the latest version?

sgnl said...

hi,

i changed the line to USB video device, but it still didn't work, so i had a look in the config file, there's another line in there which is:
[HQVideoDevices]
[_0]Bluetooth Camera[/_0]
[_1]USB Video Device[/_1]
you need to change that line to
[HQVideoDevices]
[_0]USB Video Device[/_0]
[_1]Bluetooth Video[/_1]

NOTE: change the square brackets to greater than, less than symbols i.e. < >

it worked!

cheers.

Anonymous said...

Thank you very much! Your blog was very helpful!

Jürgen said...

hello!

sorry for my english...

i have a sony vaio and the problems with skype and video options. but with the beta version skype 4.2 it works!!

greets from austria!!

trotmaster said...

Thanks Jürgen!

Indeed it looks like Skype 4.2 fixes this problem:

Download Here

Quote from their release notes:
Skype crashed in video options or when on a video call for users with Sony Vaio
notebooks with virtual Bluetooth video cameras

danthekiwi said...

Haven't tried v4.2 yet - but this fix worked a treat. Cheers fella!