Question / Help 2 PC - Avermedia C985 Extended Monitor can't project

[DaYeg]

I have a two-PC setup with an Avermedia C985 capture card in my streaming PC. If I clone my 120 hz display to the Avermedia Card, my stream experiences really bad screen tearing. I found the following suggestion to bypass the screen tearing:

1. Open OBS and disable encoding while preview (important)
2. Extend your desktop to your avermedia (in windows or nvidia)
3. Preview OBS
4. Rightclick OBS and do fullscreen preview mode
5. Rightclick OBS and choose projector and your avermedia which you'll see as a monitor in that menu
6. Now your avermedia will see your whatever you choose it to see in OBS, for example a game capture

It worked great. I no longer had screen tearing and my stream was looking perfect.

Now, 24 hours later, I'm unable to duplicate the same procedure. For whatever reason I can't select Monitor 1 (Avermedia C985) in the projector drop-down list: http://i.imgur.com/MOCgZym.png

Any ideas on what might be causing this?

 

[FerretBomb]

Why would you be running OBS on the gaming PC at all? Kind of one of the main points of a 2PC setup; to eliminate the OBS overhead and game capture hooking that can cause in-game artifacts.

Probably would be best to just see if your GPU can clone your main (gaming) monitor to a second output at a lower refresh rate (a number of nVidia cards apparently can do this). And yes, you're going to get screen tearing if vsync isn't on, or if the capture device can't deal with a too-high refresh rate.
You may just have to run at 60hz while streaming.

That said, the grayed-out monitor selection happens for me when I have a monitor disabled, disconnected, or otherwise inactive. Have you checked to make sure the AM card is showing the extended desktop at the time? Can you post a logfile from a working, and a non-working session (as logs contain back-end information that may point at a cause).

 

[DaYeg]

I agree that it seems questionable to be running OBS on the gaming PC, but by using this method I completely eliminated any screen tearing AND my stream looked WAY smoother (truly 60 fps) than when I would duplicate the Main display + AM card. My most recent VOD reflects these settings.

The OBS preview on my gaming PC has encoding disabled, so there was no noticeable strain on my gaming PC. The AverMedia card does show as extended while running OBS. It just won't let me project to it :(

I play CSGO mainly and do not want to reduce my monitor to 60 hz to fix it.

I'm not sure if I have a logfile from when it was working. Would previewing a stream generate a logfile?

 

[DaYeg]

I figured out what was causing my issue.

Turns out monitor 1 is my main display and Monitor 2 is the Avermedia card. The OBS monitor numbers do not match with the monitor numbers shown in Windows. So the entire time I thought I should have been able to project to monitor 1, and whenever I projected to monitor 2, it DID show up on my stream PC, but my fps would go down from 60 fps to 14 in the gaming PC OBS.

The frames drops were the result of not opening my game first and then projecting the Game Capture source to the Avermedia card. I would always set up the project before opening my game.