"Camera has failed" Error + Possible Solutions

EDIT: The culprit was Cerberus, and its "Wrong Unlock Code Photo" feature (and possibly all of its features that relate to using the camera). See post #8.

What the problem is: after a couple of minutes or hours, your camera suddenly "dies", meaning when you open any camera app (e.g. Snapchat, Camera Zoom FX, stock Camera, Instagram (when taking a picture)), causing "Camera has failed" or "Cannot connect to camera" messages. The only solution to this is rebooting.

Supposed solutions: there are many "solutions" posted that apparently worked for people, such as:

- Flashing back to stock (and sticking with the stock kernel)
- Doing a factory reset / internal storage wipe
- Battery (and MicroSD) pull
- Clearing the data and cache for Camera (and Gallery)
- Removing or replacing the MicroSD card (if any; it may be corrupted)
- Deleting all images/videos (may be corrupted)
- Uninstalling Skype
- Killing the mediaserver process
- Unfreezing the default Email.apk
- Updating the camera firmware (note: must have TouchWiz)
- Physically opening the back, and checking the camera connection
- And some other weird ones, like removing the top left screw.
(disclaimer: do the above "solutions" at your own risk)

What I've done: I did all of the above, except the last two which involve you physically opening up your phone.

Even flashing back to stock (TouchWiz), removing my MicroSD card, unfreezing the default Email.apk, updating the camera firmware to the latest version, I still get the failed camera every now and then. Clearing data/cache for Camera/Gallery doesn't fix it. Only a reboot does.

Possible Cause and Solution: undervolting too much may be the cause.

One common denominator that I recently realized is that I like to undervolt (e.g. lowest frequency set at 800 mV). I usually flash a custom kernel almost immediately after I flash a rom, and then configure it.

Currently I have reset my kernel (KT747) to its default settings, default voltages, and the camera has been working for the past few hours, so let's see how this goes! I will keep everyone updated.

I just wanted to share this thread because I know this is a pretty annoying "bug" and I know how much we XDAers like to tinker with our kernels and voltages.

Of course, another assumption may be that the hardware itself has deteriorated and needs to be replaced, but I keep my phone in an Otterbox and have never dropped it.

If you are reading this and you have no problems with your camera: DO A NANDROID BACKUP NOW. I have no idea why or how this problem started, but that's one piece of advice I would offer to those of you who don't currently have this issue.

Thanks Perseus!

I happened to come across LeanKernel, and the "slow", "nominal", "fast" settings. I never knew about this; apparently this tells you what kind of chip you have and how much undervolting it can handle:

http://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?t=2102369 (see post #2)

I get PVS: 3, which apparently means "Fast"

Hopefully this info is useful.

If anyone else is experiencing this issue, feel free to let me know what you've done to try to fix it I'm going to try out different things (kernels + settings) and report back.

EDIT: FOLLOW UP - 10 hours after (since 10am today), with LeanKernel 8.6 and the recommended settings in this post for my chip type (fast), my camera is still working fine. Now I'm on SlimBean 4.3.1 build 2.2 as well. Let's see how long this goes...

EDIT 2: woke up today, and at 9am I got the camera failed message. So while it's still lingering around, it went nearly a day without failing. I wonder if it has anything to do with my phone being idle (e.g. if it goes into a deep sleep). Just rebooted (11:30am), let's see how long it lasts.

So the issue is still there. I came across this today:

http://xdaforums.com/galaxy-s3/themes-apps/cyanogenmod-camera-bug-solved-connect-t2293287
(here's the original APK by Temasek (Restart_Camera): http://temasek.hopto.org/?dir=Samsung Galaxy S3 - i9300/CM10.1/Misc )

Requires root, and what it basically does is run the kill -9 `pidof mediaserver` command.

Many people have said it helps (temporarily) fix the error for them, but it didn't work for me. They did say they were on vanilla CM, so I may flash that tonight and see. (I'm still on SlimBean)

I checked my running apps, and saw Snapchat was running, so I have frozen it with Titanium to see if this will help (as it is also the only app I use that triggers the camera on start, aside from "camera-only" apps).

Will report back!

*please ignore*

Thanks, so with my latest edit to my last post, I believe I have solved the mystery (in my instance at least).

The culprit is/was most likely Cerberus, and its "Wrong Unlock Code Photo" feature (and possibly all of its features that relate to using the camera). I was able to "crash" my camera after purposely mis-entering my pattern gesture a couple of times in a row. My guess is that Cerberus does not cleanly terminate the camera access when triggered repeatedly. (edit: I found this link that mentions a very similar issue with Cerberus - https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/cerberus-support-forum/hagX135SmVk)

I have disabled it to see if it was the culprit, and so far, the camera is not dying after purposely mis-entering my pattern gesture a couple of times in a row (I tested both rear and front cameras).

If it still works after 24 hours, I'll unfreeze Snapchat and see if it is another possible culprit.

Thanks everyone for following along, and I really, really hope that this thread is helping/has helped at least one person out there.

TheLastSidekick said:

This thread just helped me big time. I'm on a 32GB Nexus 5 using Cerebrus to capture a picture when the password is incorrectly entered once.

I'm gonna test a small work around regarding having the camera run less frequently by taking photos after 3 or 4 fails.

Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk

Click to expand...

Click to collapse

Happy to hear!

Just following up: I haven't had any more camera failures after changing my wrong unlock threshold from 1 to 3 attempts (and also being more careful when entering my code).

DocHoliday77 said:

@GenericAsianGuy and @TheLastSidekick, you guys should report the issue to the developer of Cerberus. Could be they dont even know about it.

Sent from my SPH-L710 using Tapatalk

Click to expand...

Click to collapse

I've just emailed them with a link to this thread, I'll keep everyone updated as to what they say

Luca has replied:

Thanks for the feedback. We received similar reports from other users with the North American version of the S3, unfortunately we haven't been able to identify exactly what is causing the bug, to fix it. We are not able to get the phone to do some tests ourselves, because we are based in Italy.

Perhaps you could tell other people in the thread to try this?
- Reboot the phone
- Send a "Take picture" command from the website, checking "Take picture immediately"
- If that locks the camera, send us a logcat to support@cerberusapp.com , otherwise issue other "Take picture" commands until the camera locks, and then send us the logcat

Click to expand...

Click to collapse

So please send logcats to support@cerberusapp.com