Disabling webcam

[idahobob]

I've been looking through the Menu options, but can't find anything dealing with webcams, which I would like to disable. And the microphone too.
Any suggestions?

I'm using MintMate 17.1

[Pjotr]

Low-tech solution, which has the advantage of being easily reversible: a car window sticker on the webcam and a cut-off plug from a head phone set in the mike jack.

[Buzzsaw]

To disable it temporarily (until next boot):

Code: Select all

sudo modprobe -r uvcvideo

To disable it permanently, add blacklist uvcvideo to the bottom of /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf .

[arimakidd]

This works and works well. Now what is the command to quickly reverse it? So I have disabled my webcam but now I want to quickly enable it. How do I do that?

[arimakidd]

Is it -a? So..

sudo modprobe -a uvcvideo

[arimakidd]

Okay I thought it would have worked but it didn't. Launching Cheese showed no video. I am looking for some commands to quickly turn on and turn off my webcam.

[arimakidd]

Okay, done. I found it. This command will turn the webcam off:

sudo rmmod uvcvideo

and this will turn it on again

sudo modprobe uvcvideo

[JoeFootball]

sudo rmmod uvcvideo

Interesting how that worked but sudo modprobe -r uvcvideo did not.

I wonder why that didn't remove the module, as I thought modprobe -r and rmmod were essentially the same in function.

Joe

[arimakidd]

Sorry if my reply was a bit confusing or wasn't clear.

sudo modprobe -r uvcvideo

does work, but since I found

sudo modprobe uvcvideo

to turn it back on, the command that was paired with it for the convenient toggle was

sudo rmmod uvcvideo

so I'm sticking with that. But yes, the

sudo modprobe -r uvcvideo

does work.