Title: Thought I would pass on a word of warning about the recently released Skype 5 for Mac. Once installed, if Skype 5 is running (even in background), it will block Flash from being able to access your webcam. This breaks quite a few popular web applications. Unfortunately users will think the problem is caused by Flash, when it is actually caused by Skype.<p>Examples of sites and applications broken by Skype 5.<p>http://www.dailybooth.com - core feature of the site
http://www.facebook.com - webcam record and "take a photo" feature
http://www.picnik.com - image editors that have import from webcam
http://www.webcamsnapper.com - webcam photo widget used by brizzly, dailybooth, many other sites. (disclosure: my company built this app)
adobe connect, dimdim, etc - online meeting apps<p>Skype has been aware of this issue since the release of the beta in November and yet they have not fixed it before the general release. According to their issue tracker they say this new behavior is "by design".<p>https://jira.skype.com/browse/SCM-721<p>In the old Skype (2.8) this was not a problem, so something has changed. If indeed this is not a bug and is "by design" then it is a very worrying move. Imagine for a moment things were reversed. Say for instance a new release of Flash stopped all video calls working in iChat or Skype. People would be outraged, Gruber would have a heart attack.<p>Just to be 100% clear, Skype doesn't need to be in a video call for it to block webcam access by Flash. It simply needs to be running. The only fix is to shut down Skype then reload your browser. After this the webcam will start working again in Flash. The only long term fix is to uninstall Skype 5 and install an older version.<p>More discussion of the issue in Skype forum: http://forum.skype.com/index.php?showtopic=782411
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