Question / Help No preview, black output, only audio for all sources (first time user)

[LadyMalkav]

Hi y'all,
I'm a first time OBS user. I want to use it to record short clips for my PhD dissertation from Youtube, Netflix and others. I just spent the last two hours and a half trying to make it work, reading a million posts, and I'm close to giving up on the program, so any help is welcome.

First, my specs: Lenovo Y50, gaming laptop from 2014, 64-bit, 16.0 GB, Processor Intel Core i7-4710HQ, CPU 2.50 GHz, and I have a Nvidia GeForce GTX 860M. Also, my screen is UHD, I don't know if that matters (it does give me issues with some programs)

1. At first, it just gave me an error and nothing would work. I installed the latest GeForce Experience up, updated the drivers, and the error went away.
2. However, when I do any sort of recording (VLC, display capture etc.), I end up with a video file that has audio (poor quality audio tho) and a black screen. The preview is also a black or grey screen. This is the case for all the sources.

3. I saw on the forum that for nvidia laptops we need to change the nvidia control panel to high performance nvidia processor, and so I did, both in global settings and in program settings.

4. I keep just getting black screens with audio.

The only thing I've noticed is a quick message on the bottom of the interface saying something about encoding, but it goes so fast that I can't really read it.

Any help is welcome. I've been reading for a while and even though there's a lot of posts on black screens, I couldn't find any solutions to my issue.

Find below my last log in case it helps.

https://obsproject.com/logs/fMSnu8oy99qSdPE6

 

[Osiris]

You cannot use display capture when OBS is running on the NVIDIA.

See: https://obsproject.com/wiki/Laptop-Troubleshooting

 

[LadyMalkav]

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaand it worked. I changed it to integrated graphics (in the main post in the forum it does not say anything about laptops, it just says to use the high performance direction! maybe that's something that would be good to change, for other laptop users like me)
Thank you, stranger. Sending waves of gratitude your way.

 

[Strigoi]

Interesting... I'm having a similar problem, but on a mini-ITX with a 1060 3GB. OBS doesn't like some inputs, such as Window Capture and Game Capture for Retroarch. The preview stalls, and the input is just a black screen. All other inputs, such as a webcam or text in the same scene work well. The solution above doesn't work for me, since I only have one GPU.

 

[RobertDuffy]

I think the issue is in lack of vertical sync or a frame rate limiter. It often causes performance issues with OBS. Good luck with your PhD dissertation .

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