Bug Report Droste feedback effect.

Mister Hayman

New Member
I have googled this and the threads seem a bit opened ended and fairly vague. Also advising things like turning area off isn't a fix: its a workaround at best.

Its happening for me since a recent reinstall of obs.. it always was a bit twitchy to be honest. Now its unusable.
 

Osiris

Active Member
The solution is to not capture the OBS window. And if you are on windows 7 and are using window capture, Aero needs to be turned on.
 
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Mister Hayman

New Member
Just to classify what's happening: I select to add a window capture and the exe I want to is already displayed there usually - because any half decent coder would have excluded obs by default surely :) - but i get the window feedback issue. So its probably Aero, which won't work for me because I have both machines in question set up for performance over visuals . which is good practice really.
 

Mister Hayman

New Member
@Osiris Its a bug as it turns out. In simple terms if you are to toggle the Disable Aero setting with obs .. then the video feedback initiates and toggling the the Disable Aero setting with obs and/or disabling transparency (Aero) will not rectify it.
 

Osiris

Active Member
No it is not a bug in OBS, as I have said, Aero needs to be enabled for window capture to work properly, so in Windows it needs to be enabled and Disable Aero in OBS needs to be unchecked.
 

koala

Active Member
It's not a bug, it's how Windows works.

With Aero active, each app is rendering to its own private frame buffer. Aero composites these frame buffers to the desktop you see. OBS grabs the private frame buffer and is able to capture the complete picture data from windows that are behind other windows.

With Aero disabled, each app is rendering into one global frame buffer. OBS grabs that global frame buffer and cuts the information out of it that contains the picture of the app you want to capture. If one window is overlaying an other window, the picture information of that other window on that overlaid part is lost. Instead, you see the overlaying window (which seems to be OBS in your case). OBS cannot recover that lost picture information, because it is nonexistant.

Your options are:
- activating Aero
- minimize OBS and use hotkeys to start/stop actions
- move OBS to a secondary monitor
 

Mister Hayman

New Member
I was on a machine with a brand new install of obs and it was all working perfectly - with or without transparency activated on the host machine.

I left transparency deactivated as per your advice.

On the default Scene I added a exe window capture - still all working lovely.

In obs I went to File->Settings->Video and selected Disable Aero.

The feedback video issue happened.

In obs I went to File->Settings->Video and deselected Disable Aero.

The feedback video issue remained.

The only change I made was in obs - regardless of the transparency//host environment.

What 'fixes' the problem is a clean uninstall->delete the %programdata% folder->fresh install. And leave the Disable Aero selection alone (in my opinion this selection needs to be removed or clarified with a hovertip//warning perhaps).

Transparency On/Off on the host machine DOES NOT cause this issue.
 

Narcogen

Active Member
No one wrote that Aero causes the 'issue'. What they wrote is that Window Capture in OBS cannot function without Aero enabled.

The feedback is caused by capturing OBS. It's not a bug, it's just what happens. You can avoid it by using window capture instead of display capture to make sure OBS isn't capturing itself, but to do that... you need to enable Aero.
 

Osiris

Active Member
I was on a machine with a brand new install of obs and it was all working perfectly - with or without transparency activated on the host machine.

I left transparency deactivated as per your advice.

On the default Scene I added a exe window capture - still all working lovely.

In obs I went to File->Settings->Video and selected Disable Aero.

The feedback video issue happened.

In obs I went to File->Settings->Video and deselected Disable Aero.

The feedback video issue remained.

The only change I made was in obs - regardless of the transparency//host environment.

What 'fixes' the problem is a clean uninstall->delete the %programdata% folder->fresh install. And leave the Disable Aero selection alone (in my opinion this selection needs to be removed or clarified with a hovertip//warning perhaps).

Transparency On/Off on the host machine DOES NOT cause this issue.

Aero off on the host machine DOES cause this issue, assuming Disable Aero is unchecked in OBS.
 

Mister Hayman

New Member
@Narcogen Not on the three machines that I have been testing on. It make no difference whether transparency is ON/OFF on the host machine. Only the Disable Aero selection in OBS makes a difference, regardless to whether transparency is ON//OFF on the host machine. Unless its in conjunction with this setting below. I have no cares about how I want my host desktop to look like I just want best performance
1548088061261.png
 

Osiris

Active Member
Noone is talking about transparency, we are talking about Aero, which is much more then that. The entirety of what Aero entails needs to be enabled, selecting a Aero theme is what we usually recommend people do.
Feel free to experiment with enabling/disabling parts of that list in your screenshot to see what items you absolutely need, I'm guessing enabling "Enable desktop composition" is definitely required.
 

Mister Hayman

New Member
Here's the compromise if yo find anyone else I the universe who wants to run on best performance (apart from the 5/6 other DJs in my crew: on the host machine set it to best performance and either run the Aero troubleshooter to tick the following boxes, or do it manually. Sorted ,,
1548089019673.png
 

koala

Active Member
Your effort with finding the minimalist visuals for maximum performance is mostly in vain, unfortunately. On a machine that is powerful enough to run OBS to decently capture and optionally stream, the impact of of Aero's desktop composition is so small, it is negligible. I bet, you have the same fps with or without. The settings were kind of relevant at a time when XP and Vista was the current Windows, but nowadays each machine is so powerful, it doesn't matter if you activate all of it or nothing. It's mostly running on the GPU with very efficient GPU commands, after all.

If you feel your desktop is faster with deactivating this stuff, it is because you deactivated the eye candy stuff such as animations, fading in/out, sliding instead of instantly move. This stuff make desktop interactions take longer, but not because it is so resource intensive, but rather because an animation takes its time to show.

Because of that non-impact, and because of other benefits of it, desktop composition is permanently active and cannot be deactivated starting with Windows 8. In some areas, it actually makes the system faster and needing less computing power, you know, because partly obscured applications are not requested to redraw their app window every time an app on top changes its position or size. That picture info is still in the private frame buffer and does not need to refresh.
 

DEDRICK

Member
Taking a huge leap here...

They are most like running Serato DJ on their PC so they have disabled everything possible that could possibly impact real-time audio performance, Windows has a considerable amount of shit that can impact real-time audio stability of Serato.

Serato needs to read a coded vinyl disc in real-time, and react to every movement with as little delay as possible, or they are using a USB controller, same applies. They need to lowest USB buffer possible to get the latency low enough.

All that being said, the Windows features in question use the GPU, USB buffer stability is mostly CPU
 

Mister Hayman

New Member
Taking a huge leap here...

They are most like running Serato DJ on their PC so they have disabled everything possible that could possibly impact real-time audio performance, Windows has a considerable amount of shit that can impact real-time audio stability of Serato.

Serato needs to read a coded vinyl disc in real-time, and react to every movement with as little delay as possible, or they are using a USB controller, same applies. They need to lowest USB buffer possible to get the latency low enough.

All that being said, the Windows features in question use the GPU, USB buffer stability is mostly CPU

we've now dedicated a machine just for running obs. because once you have all the cams and streaming happening with the DJ software (traktor actually) its just not happening. setting for performance (pretty much windows 98 style) is just common sense. as you intimated windows bells and whistles GUI is unnecessarily unnecessary :)
 

Mister Hayman

New Member
update: I have applied my 'fix' on yet another machine. and just to reiterate: toggling Disable Aero in obs causes a permanent condition that cannot be undone by toggling it back. or messing with the host environment. this is in relation to the Droste effect ONLY. and the only way to sort it is uninstall obs-> delete the %appdata% folder->reinstall obs. just to iterate: the SPECIFIC problem I am experiencing is the

Droste effect, ok?

There is also another feedback effect of layering (for want of a better word) and I have successfully replicated and fixed it using all the advice everyone has been banging on about in here. HOWEVER the Droste effect is a totally different animal, and should be considered as such.

Would it help if I maybe made a video of the issue seeing as I have manged to replicate and remedy it on more than one machine ?
 

Osiris

Active Member
Toggling "Disable Aero" will have Aero disabled for OBS ONLY, regardless if it's enabled or not in Windows, so if that is toggled Window Capture should not be able to capture a single window, it will capture anything that's on top of the window that you want to capture.
The only other case where the droste effect can happen is if you are using Display Capture and OBS is visible on the screen you are capturing.
Also toggling Disable Aero requires a OBS restart.
 
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