Question / Help OBS No Longer Works

[amlabella]

Hey there. So I've been streaming with OBS for months now and have never really run into any issues. I had some problems trying to stream The Witcher 2 recently, and since then I can't stream anything. I've tried window capture, game capture, and monitor capture, and every time the stream produces a black screen. I have no idea what the issue might be because as I said, I've been streaming for months with no issues. I tried installing an earlier version of OBS thinking an update had caused the problem, but that didn't work either.

I've included a log below when I used "preview stream" on monitor capture and also saw a black screen (the actual settings for monitor capture aren't an issue, I'm just using it as an example. I know I should disable aero and stuff like that, but the black screen/nothing showing up is the real issue). Any help would be appreciated!

http://pastebin.com/jEVj8bMt

 

[Lain]

In the log, the only thing I see is monitor capture, I would like to have a log of game/window capture as well if possible.

Also note that monitor/window capture cannot capture games in fullscreen mode. Game must be run with borderless/windowed mode for those to capture them properly.

Your bitrate is also too low for 720p. 720p 30fps recommended is 2000, 720p 60fps recommended is 3000.

 

[amlabella]

Yep, I almost exclusively use window capture with games in windowed mode, so I know about that. I just did a preview stream with Terraria in windowed mode, a game I was able to successfully stream maybe two weeks ago. Yet again I'm just left with a black screen and nothing showing up. I've included the log below (and I changed the bitrate as you suggested).

http://pastebin.com/KRYywD4P

 

[Lain]

Oh, a laptop. It's probably just a typical laptop mismatching adapter issue. Terraria might be running on the intel adapter, and OBS on the nvidia adapter. I'm betting that's the most likely cause. I wonder if game capture works on terraria, if it uses direct3d 9/up or opengl it would work, though for some reason I doubt it is.

 

[amlabella]

Nope, both are running on the Nvidia card. Don't mean to sound annoyed or anything, I know that's a common issue with laptops. I always make sure to run both OBS and the game in question on the same card. But like I said, I've been streaming games no problem (including Terraria) for months and have had no issues. That's why this is so puzzling.

 

[Lain]

Unfortunately I admittedly don't always know. I can't really truly know some of these things without having direct access to the computer, it's annoying for everyone involved, but it's just a fact of life when having to deal with something like this. Regardless, If you had it working before then something must have changed.

The reason I mention laptops is because black screens are common with laptops. It can be somewhat frustrating to deal with, I realize, but there's no other way of dealing with it to ensure an efficient capture. Perhaps somehow terraria started running on the intel adapter? I've heard of cases where games sometimes run on the intel instead of the nvidia.

I honestly couldn't say for sure in this case what the problem is, I think the most I can do is try to tell you what I know based upon my prior experience with other users.

 

[amlabella]

Terraria is just one example; no games are working, even ones that definitely run on the Nvidia card. I'll just keep messing around with the some stuff and hope I stumble upon a solution. Thanks for the help though, I appreciate it.

 

[Lain]

If no games are working then I'd definitely suspect an adapter mismatch. Black screens on laptops almost always mean an adapter mismatch. As frustrating as it might be for me to suggest this, I really think that might have occurred. Either that, or drivers screwed things up (sometimes very rarely newer drivers can mess things up if you recently downloaded some), or perhaps something else is out of date. Unfortunately I don't quite know, but that's my best educated guess; I would help you over teamviewer, but they banned me because I was using it too much and thought I was using it for "commercial" purposes. I really wish there was a less horrible (and preferably open source) alternative to teamviewer that was easy to use.

 

[amlabella]

Hmm, well I always manually set all of my games to use the Nvidia card through the Nvidia control panel. I also checked OBS on there just now and it's also set to the Nvidia card. Is there any other menu where I might check the settings for that? Maybe I'm missing something...

 

[Lain]

I don't quite know, from your log it definitely seems like you have OBS set up correctly at least, but something weird is going on if all the capture types stop working. I've never really heard of that happening before. ...Well, actually maplestory was one game that would cause that to happen, but I have no idea why that is. You just cannot capture maplestory at all, it basically breaks all captures for some as-of-yet unknown reason. There's also this weird bug with window capture that can occur with multiple monitors, but you're on a laptop, and I almost never hear of that happening anymore.

You might want to try making OBS run on intel or something to check to see if that causes it to start working. If it does, then that probably means that the game you're trying to capture is actually running on the intel as well. I don't quite know, if I were in your position I'd be setting things back and forth to see what is and what isn't working, and try to find some correlation.