So last year I borrowed a friends GTX 750, and on December I decided to give it back and get a GT 1030 for myself. OBS became uncapable of streaming with the typical "Failed to initialize video", but it could record videos.
Turns out that the 1030 doesn't have NVENC support. The configuration window said that x264 was selected for streaming, with no properties available. If I opened the dropdown list it only showed x264, and if I 'selected' it nothing would change.
After looking at my logs I found that OBS was still trying to use the ffmpeg_nvenc encoder, and I was unable to change it to x264.
I was about to fully reinstall the program, deleting user files in the process. But before that I decided to snoop on the program's files to see if there was something I could do. I managed to find the config file which set the encoder to NVENC, I copied the encoder for my recordings and pasted it on the streaming encoder. That solved the problem.
TL;DR: If someone is using NVENC and makes a change on their PC which makes only x264 available, the encoder stays as NVENC and it isn't possible to change it without editing the config files.
Turns out that the 1030 doesn't have NVENC support. The configuration window said that x264 was selected for streaming, with no properties available. If I opened the dropdown list it only showed x264, and if I 'selected' it nothing would change.
After looking at my logs I found that OBS was still trying to use the ffmpeg_nvenc encoder, and I was unable to change it to x264.
I was about to fully reinstall the program, deleting user files in the process. But before that I decided to snoop on the program's files to see if there was something I could do. I managed to find the config file which set the encoder to NVENC, I copied the encoder for my recordings and pasted it on the streaming encoder. That solved the problem.
TL;DR: If someone is using NVENC and makes a change on their PC which makes only x264 available, the encoder stays as NVENC and it isn't possible to change it without editing the config files.