How to find the process or application that uses your webcam on Windows

Details about the issue: webcamtests.com/help/your-webcam-is-used-by-ano…
Webcam Checker: webcamtests.com/check
Process Explorer: docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads…
Music: bensound.com/

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Hello my dear friends!
I want to share a simple guide explaining how to find the application that uses your webcam.
This can be useful if webcam is locked by an unknown process and your PC doesn't allow you to use it.
The problem is that once an application starts your webcam, other applications cannot use it until the first one releases it.
For more details about this issue please see the description of this video.

First of all, make sure that your webcam is really used by another process, otherwise it makes no sense to waste your time.
To do this, use the Webcam Checker. Once it detects your webcam, press the "Check" button and provide WebcamTests.Com access to it.
If your webcam is locked, Webcam Checker will inform you about this and you can proceed to the next step.

Now, you have to download Process Explorer from the official website.
This is a powerful and lightweight application developed by Microsoft Windows Sysinternals Team.
I'm pretty sure you will like it, at least because it is trustworthy, portable and completely free.

In order to find and close all processes you must run Process Explorer with administrator privileges.
Therefore, once you have downloaded it, right-click on the file and select "Run as administrator".
At the first launch you will need to read and agree to the license terms.

After starting the application you will see a list of all running processes and brief information about each of them.
Now you need to find the process that uses your webcam. To do this, press Ctrl-F or click on the "Search" icon.

Next you need to type "#vid" in the input field and press the "Search" button.
As a result Process Explorer will return a list of processes that use your webcam. Your task is to close each of them.
For this, click on the process name to select it in the main window, right-click on it, choose "Kill Process Tree", and confirm your action.
After you have killed each process, click the "Search" button again to make sure that there are no processes left.

Finally, you can close Process Explorer and return to Webcam Checker to verify if your webcam has been unlocked.
Since I closed all the processes that used my webcam, this time Webcam Checker is able to run the webcam and stream an aquarium video.
Considering all this, my problem was successfully solved.

By the way, in my case everything went smoothly, but sometimes this trick isn't enough and you have to close the parent processes of the found process. For example, I only closed "vlc.exe", but if that didn't help me, I would also close "VLCPortable.exe".
Moreover, sometimes the webcam can be locked due to other reasons and in such cases this method won't help you. That's why I recommend you to read more details about this issue by following the link provided in the description of this video.
However, I hope that these simple steps will also be enough to solve your problem.
In any case, please share your experience in comments so that I know if everything went well and what troubles you have encountered.

Thank you for watching. Goodbye!