Webcam glitches with Zoom during the online test on MacOS

[ITDevMohsin]

Describe the bug
I am appearing for the drivetest.ca test and I am facing a technical glitch every time.
For the context, It's happening for the second time with me.

The problem happened on 2 occasions:

1st: When I am in a breakout room, my webcam gets disabled automatically and I keep on clicking but it does not work. Later, I was forced to ask the examiner to do something about it and they kept telling me it was on my end. Resetting the meeting using the refresh button at the bottom right of SEB, starts to work.

2nd: In the middle of the test, my webcam stops working. The examiner asked me to switch it on but I am unable to turn it on and it seems disabled or sometimes my cam green light goes off. It worked okay for like 40 minutes and all sudden it stopped working. Voice always works okay regardless!

Both happened twice with me and it cost me $120 for the non-refundable test and both times examiners asked me to leave the exam!!

Expected behavior
The webcam embedded in Zoom meetings has to keep working regardless of anything. My all meetings and other things work fine but it happens twice on my side. Even the breakout room never created any problems either.

Screenshots
Screenshots are added.

Version Information
Please complete the following information:

• OS: macOS Sonoma 14.3.1
• SEB: 3.3

Additional Context
Add any other context about the problem here: Is it happening on specific machines or OS versions only? How many devices are affected? Did you realize any other pattern?

• Always send SEB log files (in directory ~/Library/Logs/Safe Exam Browser/ on Mac, use Settings app / SEB / Initiate Sending Logs to email log files to yourself and attach them here).
  Safe Exam Browser.zip

• On iOS/iPadOS, please activate Settings / Privacy & Security / Share iPad Analytics / Share With App Developers, especially if you observed SEB crashes. We then receive anonymized crash reports.

• Often a test link (send URL and if necessary login/password for a testing/demo account) or an SEB configuration file to reproduce the issue is helpful (remove SEB Quit and Admin passwords!) and compress the .seb file to ZIP to attach here.

WITHOUT THIS INFORMATION WE USUALLY CANNOT ANSWER YOUR SUPPORT REQUEST!

[danschlet]

Unfortunately this seems to be a bug in the WebKit browser engine provided by macOS, which SEB is using (as SEB doesn't implement anything on its own regarding camera/microphone access in its browser).

I'm sorry you had these issues, but unless we get some more information, I can only report this to Apple and see if they know about it and if they can fix it in future macOS releases.

In general, you should always complain to your exam/test provider. SEB is provided as freeware software and whichever institution decides to use it for their exams, does that on their own risk and they need to make sure it works for their users/customers. The exam provider can contact us if they want to use a proprietary SEB version which has a native Zoom client integrated, which would most likely solve these issues using Zoom in the browser.

[ITDevMohsin]

@danschlet Thanks for the follow-up.

I don't know what's going on. I sent them an email and re-sent it yesterday but they never replied.

They ask to download the software from the link to download software.

Probably, they altered the configurations in freeware software or what but it's hard to say at this point.