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I'm using a laptop running Ubuntu 18.04 with one built-in webcam (integral to the monitor), and I'm attaching multiple other webcams.

I'd like to disable the built-in webcam only, and continue to allow for as many other cameras as I choose to connect. Is there an elegant way to do this in Ubuntu 18.04?

All the current info I can find on this topic suggests sudo modprobe -r uvcvideo and sudo modprobe uvcvideo to disable and enable webcams temporarily and editing /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf to disable webcams persistently after a reboot, but both of these methods seem to turn on or off all webcams, not only the built-in webcam or a certain specified webcam.

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There is indeed a rather elegant solution. Instead of telling the driver to ignore the device, you tell the system to ignore the device.

As internal webcams are normally detected as a USB device, you can add an 'udev rule' that will disable the device at boot.

Example: In my case the internal webcam of my chromebook is listed as following with lsusb:

minimec@ace:~$ lsusb

Bus 002 Device 002: ID 1bcf:2c67 Sunplus Innovation Technology Inc

With this information we can now add an 'udev rule' to /etc/udev/rules.d

sudo nano /etc/udev/rules.d/40-disable-internal-webcam.rules

We add the following line and specify the idVendor and idProduct values using the values we got from the 'lsusb' command. As showed before my values are '1bcf:2c67'

ATTRS{idVendor}=="1bcf", ATTRS{idProduct}=="2c67", RUN="/bin/sh -c 'echo 0 >/sys/\$devpath/authorized'"

Save the the file with 'ctrl+x' 'y'. After a reboot your internal WebCam should be ignored by the system.

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  • I love you! I love you! Works perfectly. Could you provide a link explaining the 'echo 0 >/sys/\$devpath/authorized' portion of the command ??
    – cdahms
    Nov 11, 2019 at 20:08
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    Basically the command means "write '0' in file 'authorized' located at /sys/$devpath". Now '$devpath' is a variable with the actual device path that the system has detected for your internal camera. At boot every hardware component of your computer gets a configuration folder with some configuration files in '/sys/'. For 'USB ports' there is an 'authorized' file with the default content of '1' (enabled). So by overwriting it with '0', we disable the port. 'find /sys/devices -name "authorized" | xargs grep "0"' should give you the actual location of the 'authorized' file we modified.
    – minimec
    Nov 12, 2019 at 18:28

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