Question / Help Can't Get OBS to work well in VM

[guerrilla]

Hi,

I want to record some videos inside a VirtualBox VM. I started out with a Windows 10 VM. The recording works fine but the audio is terrible and crackly. I searched the forums and found there is an open issue for this so I guess there is nothing I can do about it.

I then fired up a Windows 7 VM but OBS won't even load, I get the "Failed to initialize video: Unspecified error". I googled this and the general answer given to this is "your gcard isn't good enough". I have an r9 390x but I am not sure how vitualbox handles things. In the Windows 10 image it runs fine so I am not sure why it doesn't run on windows 7.

How can I get recording and clear audio inside a VM?

Here is my error log from the win7 image:

06:01:35.656: CPU Name: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-3570K CPU @ 3.40GHz
06:01:35.657: CPU Speed: 3410MHz
06:01:35.657: Physical Cores: 4, Logical Cores: 4
06:01:35.657: Physical Memory: 2047MB Total, 1406MB Free (NOTE: 2 or 4 gigs max is normal for 32bit programs)
06:01:35.657: Windows Version: 6.1 Build 7601 (revision: 18939; 64-bit)
06:01:35.657: Running as administrator: false
06:01:35.657: Aero is Disabled
06:01:35.703: OBS 0.16.2 (windows)
06:01:35.703: ---------------------------------
06:01:35.704: ---------------------------------
06:01:35.704: audio settings reset:
06:01:35.704:     samples per sec: 44100
06:01:35.704:     speakers:        2
06:01:35.731: ---------------------------------
06:01:35.731: Initializing D3D11..
06:01:35.731: Available Video Adapters:
06:01:35.755: device_create (D3D11): Failed to enumerate DXGIAdapter (887A0002)
06:01:35.755: Failed to initialize obs video (-2) with graphics_module='libobs-d3d11.dll', retrying with graphics_module='libobs-opengl.dll'
06:01:35.977: OpenGL extension ARB_create_context is required
06:01:35.977: gl_platform_create failed
06:01:35.985: device_create (GL) failed
06:01:35.986: Failed to initialize video:  Unspecified error
06:01:37.975: Freeing OBS context data
06:01:37.979: == Profiler Results =============================
06:01:37.980: run_program_init: 2163.07 ms
06:01:37.980:  ┣OBSApp::AppInit: 13.16 ms
06:01:37.980:  ┃ ┗OBSApp::InitLocale: 5.807 ms
06:01:37.980:  ┗OBSApp::OBSInit: 364.633 ms
06:01:37.980:    ┣obs_startup: 7.538 ms
06:01:37.980:    ┗OBSBasic::OBSInit: 233.637 ms
06:01:37.980:      ┣OBSBasic::InitBasicConfig: 0.475 ms
06:01:37.980:      ┣OBSBasic::ResetAudio: 0.766 ms
06:01:37.980:      ┗OBSBasic::ResetVideo: 231.033 ms
06:01:37.980: obs_hotkey_thread(25 ms): min=0.004 ms, median=0.008 ms, max=0.523 ms, 99th percentile=0.523 ms, 100% below 25 ms
06:01:37.980: audio_thread(Audio): min=0.002 ms, median=0.014 ms, max=0.054 ms, 99th percentile=0.054 ms
06:01:37.980: =================================================
06:01:37.980: == Profiler Time Between Calls ==================
06:01:37.980: obs_hotkey_thread(25 ms): min=13.382 ms, median=25.495 ms, max=78.979 ms, 44.4444% within ±2% of 25 ms (6.94444% lower, 48.6111% higher)
06:01:37.980: =================================================
06:01:37.985: Number of memory leaks: 130

 

[dodgepong]

OBS makes heavy used of the GPU, and VMs aren't generally very good at utilizing the GPU due to the abstraction between the VM and hardware. This is definitely the case in Windows 7. I'm honestly shocked that it was able to work at all in Windows 10. The short of it is that we don't recommend running OBS in a VM, and there aren't really any plans to work on supporting that functionality.

 

[bapool]

I am using a Windows 10 VM inside VMWare ESXI 6.5 host to cast a camera as a YouTube stream from RTSP. Initially I only got the top left quadrant on the stream. I added a NVidia graphics card, made it a passthrough to the VM, and added VMWare Tools. Works swimmingly!

Brian