Black screen for display capture

Frustrated

New Member
My wife and I have just bought identical laptops (Dell Inspiron 3793 running Win 10 Pro 64-bit). These machines have two display adapters: an Intel Iris Plus and an NVIDIA GeForce MX230. I installed OBS 24.0.3 on both machines, and tested it on mine only to discover it didn't work.

After much googling and trying numerous suggested magic spells from different forum posts, I managed to get mine working for window capture by going to Graphics Settings, selecting OBS Studio as a Classic App, and selecting "High Performance" as the graphics preference, then going to "Manage 3D settings" in the NVIDIA Control Panel, selecting OBS Studio under Program Settings, then selecting "High performance NVIDIA processor" under both Program Settings and Global Settings.

I then tried the same on my wife's laptop, and it worked there too. However, we also need display capture so we can also record the dialogs that different applications pop up, which are ignored by window capture. On her machine I just reset the adapter to "Power Saving" in Graphics Settings and "Integrated Graphics" on both tabs in the NVIDIA control panel, and this made display capture work for her -- she can now record her whole desktop. On mine, doing the same thing just gives me a blank screen -- I can do window capture, but not display capture.

Since the machines are identical, I can only assume that I changed something during my initial experimentation that prevents mine from working, whereas my wife's laptop only got changed once I'd found a solution on my machine.

I'm attaching a log file from my machine. My wife's logfile is absolutely line-for-line identical except for two things:
1) Under "Windows 10 Gaming Features", mine says "Game Mode: Off" (or "Game Mode: On", the outcome is the same whichever setting I try) while this line is missing entirely from her log file -- Game Mode is just not mentioned at all.
2) Her logfile has an extra line after "[obs-browser]: Version 2.7.15" which says "[obs-browser]: Blacklisted device detected, disabling browser source hardware acceleration."

Can anyone tell me what I can do to fix this?
 

Attachments

Oops, the file I attached is a current log while OBS was still running. Here are full ones from both machines after closing OBS. Mine is *29.txt, hers is *36.txt.

The only differences are as noted above and different numbers in the timing and rescaling. Oddly enough, despite the machines being identical, the list of possible rescalings under Settings > Output > Recording is quite different on the two machines (mine has 960x540 as the first entry in the list, hers has 910x512). I don't know if this is significant, or why it should be so different on the two machines.
 

Attachments

I just did the obvious, and copied her entire obs-studio settings directory from shell:appdata to my machine. Guess what, it now works. I kept a copy of my original settings directory and will try to figure out what's different between them.
 
Back
Top