Windows 10: Microphone/camera controls hanging out in floating widget; please help me hide it

I'm not sure how this happened, but at some point I enabled a little floating widget thing that I can use to turn my camera and microphone on and off. It floats over top of any and everything.

In the attached screengrabs, you can see it floating over top of the tool bar of a fire fox window and the full screen video of a maximized YouTube window.

Can anyone help me figure out how to hide it? It's really obnoxious, I don't need it, and I don't know when it started showing up. My only guess is that I turned it on at some point when I was setting up zoom or another video conferencing program. I've googled quite a bit but I can't find anything; it's possible that any search results are being drowned in microphone and camera hardware issues.

If it's relevant, I have no hardware microphone, but I do have a virtual patch cable program installed called CABLE. I have no hardware camera either. I'm running windows 10 home version 1903, OS build 18362.1082.

EDIT: Attached screenshots; whoops. https://imgur.com/a/wDNeZhr/

submitted by /u/mambocab
[link] [comments]

:)

 

Camera and Microphone Privacy

Hi Moustafa,

This issue occurs due to permission issue, driver issue, license for an app is out of sync with the license installed on the computer or if the app is not updated. To give permission to Camera and Microphone app, you may follow
these steps:

• Go to Settings.
• Select Privacy.
• Look for Camera, make sure that “Let apps use my camera” is turned On. You may choose the apps that can use your camera as well.
• Go back to Privacy and select Microphone, make sure that “Let apps use my microphone” is turned On. You may choose the apps that can use your microphone as well.
  

If the issue persists, we would suggest that you check out this
link. This will provide you troubleshooting steps regarding Camera and Microphone issues.

Feel free to contact us if you have further inquiries.

 

Weird floating Youtube widget, how to stop it?

Thanks for the suggestion, I had checked that. This is Windows doing this. I don't think a chrome extension could know the CPU usage, and it's definitely (proven now) that it was only happening during > 95% cpu usage. It was like Windows was thinking "I can't guarantee I can reliably render these youtube videos while the CPU is being slammed so much". It's an admirable thing that it cares about my entertainment experience, but I'd rather it limited the CPU hog task(s) to help me, rather than randomly pausing the video instead and offering me a control widget.

 

Weird floating Youtube widget, how to stop it?

It's a Windows mechanism, it works with whatever application enables it, Skype, Spotify, even foobar2000...