Question / Help Almost blank screen capturing PPT

[David Carlstrom]

Trying to record screen of PowerPoint (and other programs) I get a sketchy outline of the image not the detailed image. Log and example attached. Used to work on this Win10 laptop, but at some point it degenerated to this. Also did the same thing with a clean install on a friend's laptop. My old Win7 machine still works fine. What must be checked?

 

[Harold]

You have to display capture for powerpoint, not window capture.

 

[David Carlstrom]

Don't know what you mean. Attached is what I am doing. I tried Game Capture and that is completely black. Is there another place to set up a capture?

 

[Narcogen]

There are three kinds of capture: Game, Window, and Display. Game doesn't work, as you saw (black screen). WIndow also doesn't work. You need to use the third kind, which is Display capture. You add it as a source instead of Window Capture.

 

[Harold]

Powerpoint isn't a game, and it renders in such a way that the ONLY way to capture it is using display capture.
You can't use window capture on it
You can't use game capture on it.

 

[Narcogen]

Also, if this is a laptop running Win10 he'll need to select OBS to run on the Intel GPU instead of the Nvidia one to get display capture to work, correct?

 

[David Carlstrom]

With all the advice it does now work. TNX. Two little points: 1) It would help if the Game, Display, and Window were grouped together in the Window, so I would find them all without your help. 2) What changed? It used to just work. In May I downloaded OBS to a friend's laptop, and it just came up capturing the whole screen including Sequoia, an audio mixing system. No struggle, like now.

 

[Narcogen]

As I understand it, it is because OBS now defaults to running on a high performance, discrete GPU if it detects it, whereas before it did not do this. Because of the way Windows handles laptops with a single display and both integrated and discrete GPUs, display capture is not available when running on the discrete GPU. However, I am only a user, not a developer, so this answer may not be complete or completely accurate.

 

[RytoEX]

1) It would help if the Game, Display, and Window were grouped together in the Window, so I would find them all without your help.

Sources are sorted alphabetically. I don't know if sub-menus in the context menu are better than the current scenario, but we are looking at ways to improve the UI. If you meant they should all be a single source, it's currently not feasible to do that, because it is too complex to write code to handle every scenario for automatically selecting the best capture method.

2) What changed? It used to just work. In May I downloaded OBS to a friend's laptop, and it just came up capturing the whole screen including Sequoia, an audio mixing system. No struggle, like now.

As far as I know, OBS doesn't have an automatic display capture setup feature like this. It is possible that previously, OBS was starting up on your Intel GPU (Power Saving GPU), which controls the display. As of OBS Studio 22.0.0, the software attempts to run on the High Performance GPU (usually an NVIDIA or AMD GPU) by default because that is the most common use case. You can still set OBS to run on the Intel GPU using the "Graphics settings" in Windows 10 (version 1803 or newer) or using your GPU's control panel software.