# Virtual Cam output gets distorted and turns greenish



## dtoux (Dec 8, 2020)

I use the Virtual Webcam built into OBS 26.0 with MS teams and it works well for the most part. But, in some cases, the image the other party seeing turns greenish and distorted. If I stop sharing the video and resume again, the video is okay for a few seconds and then it turns green again.

I made a few observations but they are inconclusive:
- in many cases person on the other end uses Linux. but not always
- in other cases, the person on the other end has a relatively slow computer, but not always
- the internet latency seems has no effect

My uneducated guess is that maybe the combination of resolution and frame rate are too high. My output resolution is set to 720p30 in video settings but I don't think it has an effect on Webcam output. I also don't think that video from the webcam is compressed, so compression settings should make no difference. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

Any ideas on what may be causing this issue and if there is any solution or workaround?


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## kirkd (Dec 9, 2020)

I have this exact same problem in Teams in Windows (OBS 26.0.2 64bit).

So far the only times I have seen it happen, one of the other users is using Linux - so while that seems a very strange and unlikely cause of the problem, I feel that since it is also what dtoux noticed I have to mention it!

Virtual Camera has been OK in Zoom and Jitsi - it's only in Teams I have noticed a problem.


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## dtoux (Dec 9, 2020)

It happens intermittently, so even on the same call I can restart the video several times and it may become stable after a few attempts. So, it may have something to do with bandwidth and the way Teams encodes video. Any clues on how I can find out the current resolution of the virtual cam and if there is a way to control it? A sample of the image is attached.


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## Mandonnaud (Dec 12, 2020)

Hello,

We are talking about the same problem here:





						Green Screen While Streaming on OBS
					

Hi Everyone, First time poster but not a first time OBS user. I am am museum educator who is using Microsoft Teams and Zoom to connect with school groups across the world during the pandemic.  I have been an OBS user for years and got the latest update 26.0.2 (64 Bit). Recently I have had what I...




					obsproject.com
				




I use Zoom, the problem is on the stream sent, no matter who


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## Jared_O (Dec 17, 2020)

This all started for me after the December 8th Windows "update" . . . (a term I use loosely).  After that I get the same issue.  Not everyone sees the green, and not always  When there are 2 to 4 people, some will see the green, but usually when there are 5 or more, no one does.  The screen always looks perfectly fine for me. 

This is not just THEIR issue.  I am a teacher of the Deaf.  I use OBS so they can see me and the work they need to do projected behind me.  Please, if anyone has a fix, let me know.  My job and the education of my students are LITERALLY at risk, here . . .


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## urtyp (Dec 22, 2020)

Hello, got the same issue! I expierienced it with OBS via Zoom (virtual cam) Was 100% stable before...  It occured for the first time after Windows update. I foound out by myself, as soon as i turned of hardware accelaration at the Zoom video settings, "green screen" disapperad. For me it was solved, had some smaller "meetings" where I reproduced the issue and as soon as I unchecked the hardware acceleration green screen disapperad... Now I read in ohter threads that this also might be just a "temporary" solution... Tonight I have about 40 students to "teach" sports... I really hope everything goes well... Has anybody an idea how to permanently ban/resolve this bug? I also will keep you updated if I got news...


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## urtyp (Dec 23, 2020)

Hello again, I just wrote to official Zoom support and got (immidiately) following news. (Which I was allowed to share).

"
Thanks for contacting Zoom Technical Support!

I understand your concern regarding the green filter appearing on your video.

Regarding that, please know that this is a known issue that our engineering team is currently working to resolve. The issue is that a green overlay on camera view is being sent from the meeting host when on the Windows desktop client to the participants' clients.

The workaround right now is for the host of the meeting (who is on Windows client) to disable "*use hardware acceleration for receiving video*". There is no need to adjust any other settings aside from this one.

I hope this clarifies things for you. If there is anything else I can do for you or you have any further questions, feel free to let us know. "


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## PetterSpace (Dec 28, 2020)

urtyp said:


> Hello again, I just wrote to official Zoom support and got (immidiately) following news. (Which I was allowed to share).
> 
> "
> Thanks for contacting Zoom Technical Support!
> ...


Thanks, It has worked for me at the moment, let's hope they solve it permanently


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## FreshDaddyE (Jan 14, 2021)

Registered here just to share my fix for this.  

I'm using dual Logitech Rally cams and a Meetup and this issue was making OBS utterly unusable for me (which was a TERRIBLE shame).

For Microsoft Teams at least, the platform will only support 1920x1080 at 30fps.  Hardcoding both of those settings for my cameras has made OBS rock solid and no more green screen of death!

YMMV, but I hope this helps someone.


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## eStark (Jan 19, 2021)

I got the same issue. I'm on Windows 10 with latest OBS software and using the virtual cam oputput in MS Teams. It happens usually at the beginning of a meeting. Stopping and starting the virtual cam in OBS fixes the issue immediatly. I got the feeling that it is somehow related towards new participants joining the call in MS Teams. 
The above mentioned configuration to 1920x1080 at 30 fps didn't solve my situation.

As it is quite anoying and other meeting participants get distructed I'm really looking for a fix.


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## PhoenixElvisNicholson (Jan 29, 2021)

Following with curiosity as I'm about to join a Teams meeting in a few days. Anxious to see a fix


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## detestible (Feb 3, 2021)

A friend and I have been having the same issue with the OBS Virtual Camera video stream turning green at the beginning and at other times during a Microsoft Teams meeting.  I will try some of the settings presented here and see if it fixes the issue.

I can say that during our testing (with many people on a conference) every time my friend "pinned" my video stream (made it full window), within 3 to 10 seconds, it would turn green.  We verified this in many different conference calls.  This would also follow why it turns green at the beginning of a meeting if you are the first person to join the video goes full window when the next person joins which is similar to "pinning" the video.  When my friend would ignore my video stream it was fine and would not go green (except at the beginning of the call).  Also, any one-on-one video calls cause the green to happen (which also follows the full window turns it green theory).  Not sure there is a workaround for this theory as you can't control if someone decides to pin your video and I haven't found any settings to disallow this action.

Just thought I'd post what I found.


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## SebastianMunich (Feb 11, 2021)

Dears,

I can prove it is still an issue with 26.1.1 (64bit) Windows where i got green screen after getting set full screen 3-10 seconds after switched to be on stream. I have the impression when it's a fresh Teams Live Event it not occurs very often, but if the meeting goes on it happens more often. Switching off/on cam is helping but not something you want to consider being presented to the attendees. Also leaving the Teams Life Event and restart OBS helped me a bit, but i also really seeking a relyable setup.

I tried to go with 720 also in hope it would make a difference, but it don't...
I for sure have no background effects applied..... 

Hope it can help a bit to find this issue in combination with OBS/Teams

Thanks a bunch from munich.


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## SebastianMunich (Feb 11, 2021)

I try next time with this setting enabled to disable hardware acceleration within Teams, if it has any impact on the situation.


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## Koshkakissa (Mar 20, 2021)

Any other update on this? It just started happening to my team members pretty constantly. We've tried all the solutions through this thread.


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## TK-093 (Mar 22, 2021)

I'm interested in any solution as well.   Just ran into this last week, while messing with OBS/Teams for the first time.


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## heelix (Mar 26, 2021)

I've seen this problem on different Systems, with very different Hardware. So i'm not sure how the HW-acceleration can be the reason. PCs are:

a 6 year old  Laptop with I5 and Intel-graphics
a new Laptop with I7 and Intel-graphics
a Desktop with Threadripper+2080TI,  which is very different to the others
All have Win10-64, but with different update-levels.
I have a lot meetings with the Laptops and i know that there are very different participants on the other side (Win 7 and 10, Macs, Linux, Laptops and Desktops)
I've seldom seen this green in zoom, but eventually the video was not able to start at all (just black)
I've seen this green-screen in Teams, Goto, and Skype but most of the time it works. Disabling camera and enabling again helps in most cases but sometimes it takes several retries.

The next thing i'll try is to use the NDI-route. That is to use the NDI-plugin for OBS as the output and the NDI-webcam (NDI-tools) in the meeting-messenger. I had never any issue when i've used that, but i've used it not so often and only with two PCs til now. (that was the reason for NDI for me)


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## heinrich.boldt (Apr 16, 2021)

I have disabled to GPU, but after 20 minutes I got this crazy greenish video in Teams while in OBS everyhing is fine, the preview is clear and nice. disabling the camera in teams and enabling starts all time with a good picture, but in a few minutes the green-webcam appears.


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## tastyracer (Apr 27, 2021)

Am new to OBS as way of improving my Teams/Zoom backgrounds via virtual camera...which it does enormously, I love it - all the testing great, until my first work Teams call and I got this green screen of death exactly as described (had to bale out) - second call was OK, third it happened again. Now I don't feel I can trust it. Really hoping there's a reliable fix. I can't run as Admin (as suggested here) as it's a work machine, it was hard enough persuading them to install in the first place)


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## andyking-pit (May 1, 2021)

I've been experiencing this issue, on a Dell latitude 7400, intel cor v7 processor, 8th gen.  I had 8GB of RAM, just upgraded to 16GB.  OnBoard video.  i do use a green screen.  I've encountered this with the onBoard webcam and the external logitech streamcam.

I'm running OBS 26.1.1

It seems to happen intermittently - but a new wrinkle which I think may help.  

In Teams, with the camera set to the OBS virtual camera, without the virtual camera started in OBS, this happened.  So while it was just showing the OBS logo... it turned green and wonky as we experience.  I can start/stop the camera to fix it but it can happen without OBS streaming, which makes me think it is an issue with the virtual camera.


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## bobvanvliet (May 11, 2021)

FreshDaddyE said:


> For Microsoft Teams at least, the platform will only support 1920x1080 at 30fps.  Hardcoding both of those settings for my cameras has made OBS rock solid and no more green screen of death!



Setting output resolution in profile/settings to 1920*1080 at 30fps fixed this issue for me as well.

At 1280*720 the green glitch in MS Teams happened every time (but I never encountered it in Zoom or elsewhere).

I'm using the native virtual camera in OBS 26.1.1


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## jgladness (May 19, 2021)

@bobvanvliet 's solution is exactly correct. Go to your Video Settings and change the Output resolution to 1920x1080@30fps. It fixed the issue immediately I was having with the "green screen"/"green filter" with MS Teams. No other app had this problem.


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## berkon (May 26, 2021)

This is a very serious issue for us as well, because we are also using Teams Live Event and transmit from our company studio to very big audiences. Very embarrassing sometimes. Another site in our company which uses a similar setup gave us the advice to not use the built in virtual camera of OBS, but instead use "old" virtual camera plugin. To be honest I doubt that the code is so much different, but at least they claim that they did not have the green-screen issue with that plugin. I can't tell whether it really helps, because we didn't have that many events since then, and since I'm still a little afraid, I' mostly using the NDI virtual camera. Fortunately we didn't have the issue with that one, but maybe we were just lucky. I always have a bad feeling when having our CEO in front of the camera and transmitting via Teams. :-(

BTW: We are always running on 1920x1080 at 30fps, so the hint above unfortunately does not help.


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## ana_pofuk (Jun 14, 2021)

Hi 
this is happening for me too, but only on Teams, to the point OBS being unusable for anything serious.
I'll try the hack from above.


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## janita (Jul 27, 2021)

This is a major issue for us as well. We use Teams Live Event for online events all the time. I used to be able to use the OBS Virtual Camera for the entirety of an event without any issues. Now it has a big green glitch from the get go and doesn't go away. I cannot use this plugin until there is a fix. Has there been an update on this?


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## konsolenritter (Jul 27, 2021)

Have you tried the hints given above?


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## dtoux (Jul 27, 2021)

Since I've originally posted about this issue at some point it went away. I thought it was fixed in one of the versions of OBS (I'm at 27.0.1 right now). But then I realized that when I was switching my camera and at some point, I configured "Output (Scaled) Resolution" in the video settings to be equal to "Base (Canvas) Resolution" effectively disabling scaling. Previously, I was downscaling the video to 720p. This is consistent with @bobvanvliet 's observations. So I suspect the issue is with the scaler. It would be interesting to try if different downscaling algorithms make any difference (I was using Lanczos) ...but if you are looking for just a workaround - this was rock-solid for me for at least a year - not a single occurrence of the green screen and I use OBS with Teams 2-6 hours a day.


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## JGayle (Sep 10, 2021)

We had the "green slime" screen also happen to us at least once at the beginning of several Live Events recently and one time it happened a few times.  We stopped and restarted the OBS Virtual Camera within Teams and solved it. However, this is not a suitable situation.  We are downscaling OBS to 1280x720x30 because our testing showed that downscaling into Teams (which outputs 1280x720) gave better quality image than if we blasted Teams with the highest quality setting. So playing with the scaler doesn't seem to be a good scenario for us since the quality of the Live Event broadcast is better with a lower quality output from OBS. I have uploaded the log files from one of the days when the green slime happened. I am not good at reading this and determining what happened and what we can do to prevent it. Is there another setting we should look at? Should we use the "old" virtual camera plugin?


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## TK-093 (Sep 13, 2021)

I still get the green screen of death.  I've installed the virtual cam module and use that and have not run into that issue since then.


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## JulesMCC (Dec 6, 2021)

Thanks for the insight on how to possibly prevent the 'green garbled screen of virtual cam' from occurring.  Its not a major problem for me as I predominantly use OBS to give me more control of my image in video conference meetings.  Someone will mention my video has gone funny and a quick off and on of the virtual cam resolves it.  Mostly they are MS Teams based, but I do join 3rd party's meetings that might use Zoom, BlueJeans, GoToMeeting etc etc.

Occassionally I will host or participate in a webinar where it is more annoying.

Will report back any findings I have but the initial feedback is that my video quality is not compromised, at least not so much that my colleague could tell from before the adjustment to the Video OUTPUT RESOLUTION.


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## wgp123 (Dec 6, 2021)

Just curious....are you not seeing significant degradation of your video stream when using OBS virtual cam, and I especially mean with any text? I've not been able to use the OBS Virtual Cam for this reason, i.e., the image everyone else sees is just too blurry and degraded, text being almost impossible to read even though it seems fine on my side. I believe the issue is that platforms such as Teams, Zoom, etc, downscale the virtual cam transmission, so no matter what I do it seems like using virtual cam isn't going to be an option, especially if text is involved. Have you or anyone else found a solution for using virtual cam without the image being blurry and degraded, and allowing text to be transmitted cleanly?


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## Satch (Sep 29, 2022)

If anyone is still having this problem, I fixed it by going to Settings>Advanced>Video Section -- Set "Color Range" to "Limited" instead of Full. Up to that point, none of the other solutions posted here had worked for me.

I hope this helps!


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## oschi69 (Sep 30, 2022)

Satch said:


> If anyone is still having this problem, I fixed it by going to Settings>Advanced>Video Section -- Set "Color Range" to "Limited" instead of Full. Up to that point, none of the other solutions posted here had worked for me.
> 
> I hope this helps!


Thank you for that, it works perfectly for me.


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## Satch (Sep 30, 2022)

oschi69 said:


> Thank you for that, it works perfectly for me.


No problem, glad it worked! It was very frustrating trying to figure this out...


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