Bug Report Big Issue: Bluescreening with Monitor Capture

[ままし]

[Fixed & Updated: See bottom for more details]

When I select Monitor Capture, I am presented with the window to name the Source, and next the "Monitor Capture" window appears. I select Monitor 1 [5760x1080 / Surround Vision / 3x 1080p], then select capture mouse curse, leave everything else to default, select OK button, and then the chaos happens, it freezes with the sound repeating and then the bluescreen comes up.

I also tried enabling Sub-Region in the Monitor Capture window and only selecting region for the middle monitor, but then again it bluescreens again.

Hardware:
CPU 2700k Overclocked to 4.5ghz
16GB DDR3
Nvidia GTX 690, GT 430, On-board Video
2x SSD Raid0
Win8 64bit
OBS 64bit
30megs down 5megs up

Desktop Resolution 5760x1080 [Plus two more 1080p monitors] [5x monitors in total//all 1080p]
Streaming Resolution 1920x1080 [streams only the game plus monitor]
Streaming Reduced to 720p
Stream FPS 30fps
Game: StarCraft 2 HoTS & Diablo 3
Stream Provider: Twitch
Extra: Image overlay, movie clips from Media Player Classic, Webcam

Video Quality: 8
Preset: Very Fast [I believe...]

[The Fix]
Hello all! I am back and I come bearing good issues. The bluescreens are gone!!! It was on Nvidia's side, I just upgraded to 320.18. This version of their driver has solved all of the bluescreens I was experiencing. I use to get Stop errors with MineCraft, Remoting Control Access, and OBS desktop capture.

Nvidia's old driver 314.07 and the older driver versions for the last 6 months would stop error like this. Literally I was testing each version and updating Nvidia's forum on this issue. Nothing was correcting the Stop errors. Also, I have reformatted so many times, I can't find or remember the different driver versions I have tried. I have a testbed as well that was also getting Stop errors with Window 8, but I brought it back to Windows 7 because I needed to run those applications which was causing the bluescreen errors.

 

[R1CH]

Most likely you have some driver problem. OBS cannot cause a blue screen since it does not load any kernel components, however it does stress your system in ways other programs do not, so it may be triggering a bug in one of your drivers. Analyzing the blue screen .dmp file will yield more information.

 

[Voxletum]

I would need to see the stop code presented in the blue screen and the description of that stop code.

(would be 0x000000???) and perhaps IRQL NOT LESS OR EQUAL. Something along those lines. If you can take a picture of the screen's contents and post that here, it would be most helpful.

I'm using a 5760x1080 resolution too, but I'm not using Nvidia Surround; just extended desktop. There may be an issue with using Surround specifically. We'll need to test it, but I haven't heard of such an issue before.

 

[ままし]

I'll recreate the problem tonight on my main computer. I am testing a similar environment on my second computer with Windows 8 as well, obs, and other applications. On the second computer, I ran Windows updates to ensure it's up-to-date and downloaded the newest beta video drivers. Which can be helpful, but at other times it has caused problems in the past as well. :S

 

[PaulKerry]

I've never had bluescreens on my Windows 7 machine running X-plane. Not one single bluescreen, ever...
... until I start streaming with OBS. Then I get a bluescreen regularly. In fact, I can almost guarantee that I will get more than one per day if I have OBS running. When running OBS, in any given session, there is a 75% chance that I will get a bluescreen within the hour.
The code is "Stop:0x0000003B" for anyone who is interested.
I am using "game capture" mode as it works better than any of the other modes for capturing from X-Plane 10. The other modes stream a black-screen if X-Plane has focus.

It is not an overheating problem (I've been monitoring my CPU temperature and have added a lot of extra cooling to see if I can mitigate the issue). I have plenty of CPU bandwidth and memory to spare. I am running an NVidia GeForce GTX 670.

It has become too troublesome and wasteful of my time. I am going to have to cough.

Paul..

 

[Lain]

Unfortunately as much as I hate to say it, OBS is a user level application. User level applications really cannot directly cause blue screens. Only code running at kernel level (drivers), or unstable or faulty hardware can actually bluescreen the system.

That being said, when you stress your system by streaming and gaming at the same time (and it DOES stress your system), you will experience and increased likelyhood of any existing instabilities of rearing their head and finally showing themselves. You are not just gaming, which already is resource intensive, but you are streaming as well, which also uses the GPU, which also uses a significant amount of CPU for encoding, transferring a lot of data to and fro on your system. All at the same time. If this were an actual bug, it would happen to everyone, and the bug reports forum would be filled with pretty much nothing but messages of the same exact nature.

 

[PaulKerry]

Perhaps people aren't bothering to report it because even when provided with the information you request, you are dismissive and edit the user's posts... My post is not as I left it and was neither offensive nor abusive.

I posted about a bluescreen issue in a thread about a bluescreen issue.... See the connection????

Stressing my system? That's your answer? Really? Perhaps you think I zip up the back...
Or perhaps you just conveniently ignored the fact that I pointed out that I have CPU cycles and memory to spare.
I can see that I'm not going to get any assistance here. You'd rather edit a user's posts for your own amusement than consider that users might actually have some valuable information to help you to fix your brokenware.

However, FYI, just in case you are actually interested. I appear to have two different versions, a 32 bit and a 64 bit version of OBS (or maybe I misunderstand). When I launch the one labelled as the 64 bit version, the chances of experiencing a bluescreen issue are greatly reduced.

 

[Lain]

Listen, if you're that upset about it then don't use the app. Emotions just lead to stupid things.. like editing other people's post, which is really sort of immature, I admit.

I am not trying to "dismiss" your problem and say it's "oh it's not the app's fault, no way it could be the app's fault". As much as I would love to do that, saying that about any problem is really bad to do if you're an engineer. It's the worst thing you could possibly do. It's one of the highest forms of neglect possible. I am just telling you how it functions with the system. Apps just typically cannot directly cause bluescreens. I am not "trying" to pass the blame off on something else, I have no clue what's going on on your end, everything I said in that post was honest.

Some people will get angry at me if I try to tell them that I don't think that the problem is with the app. Some will get angry and defensive, claiming that there's no way it's on their end. It's like I'm not allowed to say it or something. What am I supposed to say? There's nothing really I can say.

Bluescreens just have never consistently occurred for all users with any particular case that I've -ever- seen. It's always been something on their system in every case I've seen. As I said, if this happened to everybody or with some specific piece of equipment I would have known about it. And for PC hardware there are just too many differing pieces of hardware that can be any persons given system at any time, there are countless video cards, countless motherboards, countless ram chips, countless misc devices. I unfortunately cannot expect it to run perfectly with every single piece of hardware. As for why, I mean there's poor hardware out there, there's unstable hardware out there, there are also users who don't build their PCs correctly (and I'm not accusing anyone of that here, I have no clue and can't really know one way or the other), there are poor drivers, there are unstable drivers, there are just so many possibilities that play into the bluescreen causes.

I literally cannot do anything about someone getting a bluescreen, except tell them to do do some checks on their hardware/drivers. The -only- thing that I can do on the OBS end, is maybe pin down what might be disagreeing with their hardware, but if they say "well when I use this capture method I tend to have it happen", or "when I plug in this capture device and use it, it will happen", literally the -only- thing I can do is say "well, you may just have to use a different device/capture method/etc".

If you look at your bluescreen dump I can guarantee you it was active not inside of OBS, but in the kernel somewhere, a driver or something. Bluescreens just do not happen directly inside of user mode applications. A bluescreen is literally an unrecoverable crash or failure of some sort in drivers or kernel, either caused by a bug in the driver or something wrong with the hardware that went wrong.

As an addenum:
User mode application is defined as an application running at a level where it really has no direct access to anything see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_space). Not even memory is accessed directly, all memory is access virtually, a user mode application only has access to the things it allocates. A user mode application cannot actually directly access any hardware. A user mode application has to use an API (WinAPI, directshow, direct3d, or windows audio system API, directsound) to actually interact with hardware. Those APIs control how a user mode application is allowed to access, and they have built in checks to make sure a user mode application cannot directly break things, or doesn't access anything it doesn't have rights to access. This is just how it works.

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Screen_of_Death:
"Stop errors are hardware, updates and driver related, causing the computer to stop responding in order to prevent damage to the hardware or data."
"In Windows NT–based operating systems, the Stop error occurs when the kernel, or a driver running in kernel mode, encounters any error from which it cannot recover."

 

[Voxletum]

Too many letters to parse right now.

That particular stop code can be related to audio driver issues (try using onboard sound or updating your drivers) or can be caused by an unstable overclock of your GPU.

Naturally, as mentioned above, this isn't an issue with OBS.

 

[ままし]

Hello all! I am back and I come bearing good issues. The bluescreens are gone!!! It was on Nvidia's side, I just upgraded to 320.18. This version of their driver has solved all of the bluescreens I was experiencing. I use to get Stop errors with MineCraft, Remoting Control Access, and OBS desktop capture.

Nvidia's old driver 314.07 and the older driver versions for the last 6 months would stop error like this. Literally I was testing each version and updating Nvidia's forum on this issue. Nothing was correcting the Stop errors. Also, I have reformatted so many times, I can't find or remember the different driver versions I have tried. I have a testbed as well that was also getting Stop errors with Window 8, but I brought it back to Windows 7 because I needed to run those applications which was causing the bluescreen errors.

PaulKerry, I highly recommended update your video drivers. Hopefully you have a Nvidia card and this can all be corrected with a simple update.

 

[Voxletum]

Hello all! I am back and I come bearing good issues. The bluescreens are gone!!! It was on Nvidia's side, I just upgraded to 320.18. This version of their driver has solved all of the bluescreens I was experiencing. I use to get Stop errors with MineCraft, Remoting Control Access, and OBS desktop capture.

Nvidia's old driver 314.07 and the older driver versions for the last 6 months would stop error like this. Literally I was testing each version and updating Nvidia's forum on this issue. Nothing was correcting the Stop errors. Also, I have reformatted so many times, I can't find or remember the different driver versions I have tried. I have a testbed as well that was also getting Stop errors with Window 8, but I brought it back to Windows 7 because I needed to run those applications which was causing the bluescreen errors.

PaulKerry, I highly recommended update your video drivers. Hopefully you have a Nvidia card and this can all be corrected with a simple update.

In the future please also provide your stop code information here so I can look into it. Again, not an issue with OBS, but I can generally help with enough data from the bluescreen.