Question / Help Black screen when recording primary display with Display Capture

[Raen Andaleio]

Hello,

I know this problem has been around for a while, I found a couple of possible solutions, none of which worked for me, however. Maybe there are some new ideas about what I can try?
Basically, I have a 3 monitor setup, the middle monitor is my primary monitor. It has a resolution of 1920x1080. My graphics card is an NVidia GeForce GTX 1070.
Now my problem is, I'd like to use Display Capture to capture the middle/primary monitor. It has to be display capture, as I'll switch between applications with multiple windows, so window capture is not going to suffice. It works fine at first, but on random occasions, the capture turns black and will remain that until I restart OBS, which sucks during stream. It basically looks like OBS can suddenly no longer see the display - the red outline of the source that is used to scale and position it reduces to a dot.
Occasions during which it happend:
- Me opening the Twitch dashboard in Firefox before stream to adjust the title
- Switching to another scene and back
- Using a video source to play a video over the scene with the capture
Problem is, I'm unable to reproduce it, it just happens when it wants.
Also, adding a new display capture will not work. Trying to capture the other monitors, btw, will still work, even if the primary monitor yields nothing but black.

I always run OBS as admin, doesn't work. I tried changing OBS to run under Intel Graphics instead of the GTX, doesn't work because my PC doesn't have an onboard graphics chip.
I had this problem on my former PC as well, which was a completely different setup. In fact, I've had it ever since I switched from OBS Classic to OBS Studio. I was even told that this is a problem that just can't be solved, and just to live with it. But since Classic never had this problem, there must be something that can be done.

Here's the log: https://pastebin.com/nK6Thu6B The display capture stopped working between some time 19:27 and 19:38.

 

[koala]

Make sure you have not more than one display capture source for the same monitor. If you have 2 that try to capture the same monitor, they stomp on each other and steal the image. One is black and the other displays the monitor. It isn't relevant in which scene additional captures are buried.
If you need the same display in more than one scene, add the additional display capture source with "add existing". This way you are creating a reference to the existing source and not create a new capture.

You also have a game capture source. It might conflict with display capture sources, if it is set to "capture any fullscreen application", as far as I remember. Set it to capture a specific window and set the *.exe file of the game explicitly. This will also capture fullscreen if the game is running fullscreen, even if the option name doesn't suggest it.

Try to isolate your problem by deactivating heavy sources like game and monitor capture (click the eye symbol to the right of the source name to toggle activate/deactivate).

 

[Raen Andaleio]

Make sure you have not more than one display capture source for the same monitor. If you have 2 that try to capture the same monitor, they stomp on each other and steal the image. One is black and the other displays the monitor. It isn't relevant in which scene additional captures are buried.
If you need the same display in more than one scene, add the additional display capture source with "add existing". This way you are creating a reference to the existing source and not create a new capture.

You also have a game capture source. It might conflict with display capture sources, if it is set to "capture any fullscreen application", as far as I remember. Set it to capture a specific window and set the *.exe file of the game explicitly. This will also capture fullscreen if the game is running fullscreen, even if the option name doesn't suggest it.

Try to isolate your problem by deactivating heavy sources like game and monitor capture (click the eye symbol to the right of the source name to toggle activate/deactivate).

I didn't realize they could compete with each other, the other sources don't do that, do they?
Ok, the game capture was set the way you suggested, I removed all the display capture sorces, but the one I need. Your explanation about the different display captures interfering with each other actually makes a lot of sense. I don't know why a capture in an inactive scene would do that, maybe a bug in the code. But it would explain the randomness of it happening, and why only one monitor would stop working. It is the one all of them would try to capture.
I'll test it for a while.

Edit: Ok, so I had OBS run for some time, caused a couple of UAC prompts to appear (this actually triggered the bug as well, I noticed), had video sources run, switched scenes, did everything that at least at some point triggered the bug once and it didn't happen. Removing the other Display Capture sources seems to have done the trick.
I have been looking for a solution ever since I started using OBS Studio. Thanks koala, you're my hero.