Canon EOS Webcam Utility: webcam system extension issue (macOS)

[vic_ju]

Hi community,

I'm a software developer at elgato developing a cross-platform application with Qt.

Our crash reporter indicated an incompatibility with the shipping Canon EOS webcam system extension on macOS and the multimedia library from Qt. I reported the bug to Qt already here: https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-118184

Unfortunately it doesn't look like an incompatibility with Qt but a general bug in the webcam system extension. As you can see in my ticket in the qt bugtracker, something around the protobuf integration in the system extension is leaking an exception which is crashing the host application while loading the system extension.

The problem can be easily reproduced with this sample code:

#import <AVFoundation/AVFoundation.h>

int main(int argc, char* argv[])
{
    @autoreleasepool
    {
        [AVCaptureDevice defaultDeviceWithMediaType:AVMediaTypeVideo];
        
        return 0;
    }
} 

Tested environments:

• macOS Ventura 13.4.1 (22F82) / MacBook Pro 2019 (Intel)
• macOS Sonoma 14.0.0 (23A344) / Unknown (arm64)

I tried to report this to support, but without owning a device this seems to be impossible. Hopefully somebody here can report the issue to the development team and get this fixed.

Thanks,
Victor