Hi there, I am the author of the OBS Project, an open source video compositing/capturing/streaming/recording tool with a few million users.
The other day, I released (or was going to release) a new update for my software, version 18.0.2. When I sent out the update, webcams and capture devices mysteriously stopped working completely for everyone on Avast and AVG. After a lot of debugging, I determined that my new executable would cause Avast to block webcams and video devices completely. If I moved my old 18.0.1 executable back over that version, they would start working again. I did have to renew my code signing certificate with 18.0.2, so that may have triggered Avast/AVG to block them prematurely. I had to turn off my auto-update and roll back to 18.0.1 for my users.
"Disable for one hour" does not work (edit: apparently passive mode does?) -- but I don't care about disable/passive mode so much, this feature or bug really needs to be fixed or removed from Avast/AVG.
If Avast/AVG blocking video devices is a bug, this needs to be fixed ASAP because I am unable to make updates to my software while this is happening, and clearly it's affecting medical software as well.
If Avast/AVG are now by design intentionally blocking webcams and video devices of non-whitelisted code certs or (even worse) non-whitelisted executable hashes, then this is a very poor design decision that is going to cause a lot of problems for a lot of people and have major unintended consequences. Medical software as described above are now at your mercy if they want to be functional on a computer with Avast/AVG installed. Again this is an extremely poor design decision. Please, we beg of you, revert this change and stop trying to block video devices if this is the case. It invokes very strong emotions with me.
Right now I am waiting for whitelisting in the mean time, but currently have had no response. We've tried several avenues to try to get in contact and explain the problem with no feedback. Please I beg of you -- fix this problem. Do not do this.
Please, I beg of you, have mercy on those of us and your users whose livelihoods are so heavily dependent on video capture devices functioning properly. Stop blocking video capture devices.