For several years at our church we’ve been using Zoom to live stream our church services, using a Canon digital SLR camera as a webcam connected via an Elgato video capture interface. Recently we started having problems where the video feed would randomly stop during the Zoom meeting. The indicator at the bottom of the screen would show that the video was stopped, and clicking on it would start it again. This would happen at random intervals, sometimes every few minutes.

At first I thought it might have been the length of HDMI cable we were using between the PC and the camera causing an unreliable signal. I tested with the camera located adjacent to the PC with a short HDMI cable and the problem persisted, so it wasn’t the cable.

I checked in the Windows event log and discovered an “Information” message from EOSWebcam was appearing at the same time that the video had been cutting out.

A quick Google revealed that the EOSWebcam utility is software from Canon that allows the camera to be used a webcam by plugging the camera directly into the PC with a USB cable. As we were connecting via HDMI into an Elgato capture device, we didn’t actually need the EOSWebcam driver. After uninstalling it, the problem of the random dropouts of video during our Zoom livestream was solved.