Monitors going black temporarily and preview is frozen forever when running OBS

Tnuters

New Member
This is going to be a long post but going to do my best to describe what's been happening.
It's been happening for weeks and it's driving me nuts. I've done hours of research and tried to fix this including completely wiping/reinstalling windows and OBS.
To preface, as odd as it sounds, this only happens with certain games. I played Minecraft and this error has not happened once despite running the game at max settings and even streaming for 5+ hours at a time. This error is only happening with certain games, and I have no idea why. In general, this error only ever happens when OBS is active, never when I'm just gaming off stream. It happened for example while streaming Ori, Elden Ring and Cuphead.
As a general note, I only play games via Steam, not other third-party programs, and no separate launchers or anything.

I don't have a screenshot for this as it happens very quickly, but at random times, both my monitors' screens go black for about a second, then revert to normal. The game will still be playing but I need to ALT+TAB to get back into the game, however my OBS preview will be completely frozen, no matter how many scenes I switch to and will not fix itself until I close the entire OBS program. Oddly, everything still works fine. My chat can confirm that my webcam/mic still work perfectly and the game itself will also run with no problems. However, the same "black screen" will happen repeatedly at random times, during my session, taking me completely out of the game - you can see how this would be really annoying. Crash log or general log doesn't show anything weird happening at times this happen.

To put it in perspective, I had a 2 hour stream last week and this happened nearly 17 times. Another stream that week, I stream for about 5 hours and it only happened 3 times. I monitor my GPU/CPU constantly on my second monitor and they are never pushed to high percentages at any point when streaming as well. My GPU is at most at 80C temp and CPU has about 40% usage.

Things I have already tried:
Completely reinstalled Windows 10 from factory settings.
Completely reinstalling/uninstalling OBS and not keeping previous settings/scenes.
Updated all drivers, not just gpu. Latest Nvidia driver is installed as well.
OBS is currently updated to newest version, however, this error has also occurred before update took place.
Running OBS using admin mode AND each game in admin mode as well.
Turning off Hardware Acceleration in Chrome.
Energy settings are set too full performance.
Tried changing game between Windowed and Full screen (happens on both)
Tried playing with controller and without.
Tried lowering encoding settings to lowest (fastest)
Uninstalled all plugins.
Tried switching encoding to x264.
Tried switching from Display capture to Window/Game Capture.

I would really appreciate the help because I have no idea where to problem is coming from and there is no popular fix or disscussion about it. My PC is more than capable of streaming anything and I don't know where the problem comes from.
 

clairevollmz

New Member
Came here to say this is happening to me as well and I have been searching for a solution. It also only happens to me with certain games, now that you mention it.. any of those games has been played through Steam. Will keep this saved to check back on if you find a solution!
 

cozmiverse

New Member
So this has been driving me crazy and been happening to me a ton and I have no idea how to find a fix, I'm so glad I'm not alone. I finally got a good log file where it happened MULTIPLE times that all of my screens cycle black and then the OBS preview freezes. If you use studio mode you can see but the preview is gone until reboot.
 

Attachments

  • 2023-09-12 17-38-11.txt
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PaiSand

Active Member
30 plugins... really? No wonder why you have issues.
Make a backup of your profile and scene collection.
Remove all the plugins. If any plugin have an uninstaller, use it. Then uninstall OBS and reinstall it.
Create a new scene collection with the minimum sources you need.
Run the Auto-configuration Wizard (tools menu) and apply the sittings it gives. Restart OBS.
After restarting OBS, perform a test stream of at least 30 seconds doing as you normally do, including playing games, full camera or whatever you normally do.
Now look inside Help menu. Upload the current log file and paste the url to the log in here. Click on the Analize button to start troubleshooting common issues.

The idea is to make sure OBS is working as intended. Then add the basic plugins you need and use. Change the scene collection to the one you use in stream with the plugins. Test.
Of course, keep it in simple output mode always.
 

clairevollmz

New Member
Hey there, its been awhile since I wrote on this thread but the problem persists. I am attaching a log of my stream from tonight. It happened around 22:10, I can clearly see something happened in the log but I am not tech savvy enough to translate this into common terms.

One thing to note is when this first started happening my monitor screens would go black, OBS preview would be frozen. but after a few seconds the game would continue to work. NOW the game becomes unresponsive and I am forced to force quit and restart the game. Again, nothing happens to my stream, OBS doesn't crash - just the preview is frozen.

Any advice would be SO appreciated. Thank you!!
 

Attachments

  • 2023-09-18 18-23-41.txt
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cozmiverse

New Member
Hey there, its been awhile since I wrote on this thread but the problem persists. I am attaching a log of my stream from tonight. It happened around 22:10, I can clearly see something happened in the log but I am not tech savvy enough to translate this into common terms.

One thing to note is when this first started happening my monitor screens would go black, OBS preview would be frozen. but after a few seconds the game would continue to work. NOW the game becomes unresponsive and I am forced to force quit and restart the game. Again, nothing happens to my stream, OBS doesn't crash - just the preview is frozen.

Any advice would be SO appreciated. Thank you!!
I have a sneaking suspicion it may be streamelements related. It caused errors for both of us. What GPU do you have?
 
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