ISight drivers - getting them to work in Parallels

Question

I hope this is helpful to other people. I got it to work, but it was not easy. For one thing, Apple made it more difficult by taking the drivers offline after Leopard was released. For another, the nice people at Parallels draw the line and say "you're on your own" because Apple publishes the drivers.
In case you were using the first set of drivers that Apple made available with the Beta version of BootCamp, and if (like me) your camera stopped working suddenly, then here is what I discovered and I hope it helps you too:
1. You can't be running iChat or any other Mac app that uses the camera simultaneously with Windows running under Parallels (probably also true for VMWare Fusion) because the two operating systems can't share the camera. If you have iChat open when you launch Parallels, you're going to hear your Windows alarm sound constantly beeping or bonging at you as the camera keeps going on-off-on-off-on-off-on-off-on-off-on-off-on-off-on-off no matter how many times you go to the Devices menu to be sure it's checked. Sometimes it won't even be in the devices menu; that's when iChat has hold of it. So, turn off the Mac apps that are using the camera if you want to use it in Windows.
2. Get out you Leopard DVD and put it in the drive slot. Hold down the shift key or it will auto-launch into the Boot Camp installer in your Windows OS. If it does launch the Boot Camp installer, cancel and quit that thing. Then, you'll have to navigate the contents of the DVD to get to the driver installer.
Parallels as a pretty good knowledge base articule about it: http://kb.parallels.com/entry/42/563
The main thing you need to do is to first, use the Windows Device Manager to verify that the camera exists and is selected in the Parallels Devices menu.
Then, you'll try to double click the item called AppleIsightInstaller.exe which you'll find in the DVD in the Drivers/Apple folder. If it runs, you're lucky because that means you don't have a previous version already on your Windows system. If you do, you won't be able to get it to run that way. Instead, you will have to launch a command prompt and do it that way.
What I did to insure it would run is a dragged a duplicate copy onto the Windows desktop. In the command prompt, I first typed cd Desktop to switch to the desktop directory, then I typed: appleisightinstaller -p (That's a space after the long word, followed by hyphen p)
Again if you are lucky, it will tell you that it found a previous version, or even that it found a current version but it allows you to over-write it anyway. Do it. In fact, you may have to reboot and do it more than once. In my case, I had to do it about 8 times.
With luck, that will restore the operability of your camera.
If not, then go to the driver details in Device Manager and observe that there may be a bunch of other system nonsense besides the Apple drivers. In my case, there were some Logitech drivers because I had tried (without success) to solve the problem by installing an external Logitech camera. Anyway, I deleted those Logitech items manually, making sure that I checked each and every one to be sure to not delete anything from Microsoft or Apple. Well, actually, you can delete the Apple items if you are willing to reinstall them again. Just don't delete any Microsoft ones or you'll regret it when you have to reinstall your OS.
Hope all this is helpful to you. There is really no excuse for Apple not publishing instructions for the use of their drivers, IMHO.

Answer 1

Parallels say "you're on your own" because...
Go to Devices -Built-in iSight to turn off iSight in your virtual machine.
When you install Windows using [Boot Camp|http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/bootcamp.html], you won’t need to search the Internet for drivers or burn a disc. Your iSight might not work with Vista at the moment.
Message was edited by: CodLBi