Wine problems with USB, Respondus Browser

I have been fighting for the past 5 hours, trying to install and run Respondus Lockdown Browser (basically a piece of malware I need to do my uni exams…)

However, this app is only made for MacOS and Windows (of course, duh), and is so obnoxious and stubborn, that it doesn’t want to run on a Virtual machine or through remote desktop (to my Windows PC).

After so much fighting, I managed to install it using wine, it opens and runs. HOWEVER… When it performs a Webcam check, it just throws up an error and crashes.

I had a very close similar issue today, when trying to share access to my USB devices through QEMU-Agent in my Virtual machine. I got an error given in the attached screenshot. I fixed that by running remote-viewer with sudo.

I am suspecting that my user doesn’t have access to the USB devices (i.e camera and mic). Which is strange, since I have added my user to the group video and audio, and I can see the camera when I open through, lets say VLC. And I couldn’t figure out how to run Respondus in sudo (since I need to open it from a link, which is hidden from me, on my uni’s course webpage).

I got into a whole rabbit hole of trying to use polkit and whatnot, but nothing so far.

Any advice/tips/direction would be nice.

I used ChatGPT for most of my searches, it just is better than Google atm, to get quick answers. Here’s the discussion thread I used to get to where I am now:

Given what the software is designed to do, it is unlikely that it will run on anything other than bare metal with either MacOS or Windows.