Question / Help OBS not recording video

Sentient Anomaly

Sentient Anomaly

New Member
Hello guys, I've been using OBS for a while now although I mostly used the Display Capture feature to record gameplay and haven't really played around much with other features.

Anyways I wanted to ask why many time OBS does not record video, and this seems to happen in a variety of ways: it can be a fully black screen, a frame from the last time a alt-tab happened in or out of a game, or for example a frame of a pause menu. Audio is usually recorded without problems.

I tried various combinations of recording the whole display, or any full-screen application, or a specific appliaction, and it seems that certain combinations don't work at all with some games, while some other combinations of settings work only sometimes. Overall I'm quite confused.


I have recently done my first live streaming on youtube (much to my inexperience about a lot of things related to live streaming), but it was a complete disaster, since OBS did not show the game at all, it was stuck on a pause menu frame. When I alt-tabbed out of the game to show the browser, or when I changed scene to a still image, it worked fine.

At the time, there was no way for me to tell if the video was working fine, I do not have access to another computer or monitor to check my own stream.

You can review the video here. Just skip through it to see what it's wrong with it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65IW0EyCN3g

I don't have a log of the issue at the moment but next time I'll try to provide it.

So I'd like to do some more streaming, hopefully some successful ones next time, but I feel like I have no control over OBS's actual status of things working as intended or not.

Not sure if required but I'll paste my system specs:
Chassis: Clevo P771ZM
Motherboard: Intel Z97 Chipset
GPU: GeForce GTX 980M 8192MB (8GB) GDDR5
CPU: i7-4790K | Quad Core | 8 Threads | 4,0 GHz
RAM: 16GB (2x8192) SO-DIMM DDR3 RAM 1600MHz Crucial
SSD: 512GB SSD Samsung m.2 XP941
SSD2: 256GB Crucial C300
OS: Windows 10 64 bit version 1511 (build 10586.494) <--- I actually got an OS update today, but this is what I have been using while experiencing the issue.
Nvidia Drvers: 364.72 (they are slightly outdated I know)
 
Sentient Anomaly

Sentient Anomaly

New Member
Hi, I'm back. I checked my log folder, I think I found the right log. I mean I have a lot of logs but since I have a specific video to show a specific issue, I guess we should focus on that specific log.

I'm trying to see how I can upload a that in particular since it's not the last or the current one. Is that even possible?
 
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Harold

Harold

Active Member
Copy the contents to pastebin or gist.github.com and link the resulting paste entry.
 
Sentient Anomaly

Sentient Anomaly

New Member
Okay, here it is! https://gist.github.com/anonymous/797fa2fc0c7c953dd88b321da8b1965e
So this is the log that matches the video that I was streaming on youtube, which can be checked here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65IW0EyCN3g

I was actually recording the video locally as well as streaming it. Which reminds me, I wanted to ask, is there a setting in OBS to save a video on my local hard drive as a start streaming, like an auto-record function when you start the stream, or can I only start streaming and recording on my computer manually, separately?
 
Harold

Harold

Active Member
Disable the "Force Scaling" option on your game capture source.
And try to limit the number of game capture sources in a scene collection to 1 or 2.

Which reminds me, I wanted to ask, is there a setting in OBS to save a video on my local hard drive as a start streaming
Click to expand...
That function was added in 0.15.0 and is in the main general section of the settings.
 
Sentient Anomaly

Sentient Anomaly

New Member
I can't seem to find the Force Scaling option. Under Properties, the only options I see are Capture Cursor and Multi-adapter Compatibility. Also, what does Force Scaling actually do? Just trying to understand why disabling it should or could fix it.

And there was only one game capture source in a scene.

For that last feature, thanks, I found it and enabled it :)
 
Sentient Anomaly

Sentient Anomaly

New Member
Hey Harold, for some reason these are the only options I see: http://oi63.tinypic.com/6jhy4p.jpg

And about the entire scene collection, okay, I see, but still, I had only one game capture source in the entire scene collection.

Like I said, normally I only use Display Capture as the only scene and source, and I had this problem of video recording only a black screen or just a still from the game. That time that I was streaming and I had this problem too, I did have 4 scenes in total, but one was an image, one was the entire display capture that I kept disabled at all times, one was the game capture with Dying Light selected as the application, and the last was a Firefox window with just one tab open to show my own stream and chat.

Anyways thanks for your help so far, I really appreciate it.
 
Harold

Harold

Active Member
Don't use window capture to capture games, use game capture. That screenshot is from a window capture source.
 
Sentient Anomaly

Sentient Anomaly

New Member
Okay, thanks, I see where that option is now. But it's already unchecked. So unfortunately both of the two things you mentioned which could have had something to do with the issue, don't seem to be connected to it :/
 
Sentient Anomaly

Sentient Anomaly

New Member
No. But from now on I'll keep things organized and after every time I experience an issue I'll post the log right away so we can look into it.
 
Sentient Anomaly

Sentient Anomaly

New Member
0.15.4

And I just went right now and tried to have a normal use of OBS, and I did a normal test to see if it was working as expected, and as expected, it wasn't working as expected.

I had Dying Light open in the background, on a loading screen. I started the recording while looking at my video folder to make sure the video file would actually get created. Alt-tabbed back in the game, alt-tabbed out without pausing it, switched around a few windows just for testing, then back to game, this time paused it and alt-tabbed out again, switched around a few windows again, back into the game, I also started and stopped some music during the process.

You can see it didn't record anything past what I assume is the very first frame.

You can tell when I'm alt-tabbed out of the game because you can see my windows cursor in addition to the in-game cursor.

I'm providing a log for it (video recording starts at 22:47 so you can just check from there on the log): https://gist.github.com/anonymous/3076404e8397f794d94927a76dbafabc

and video generated during the test: https://youtu.be/YgJSIKupEr0

Edit, adding more info: I was recording Dying Light through a game capture source with the specific game window selected, not the "any fullscreen application" mode.
I pretty much never uses anything other than the whole Display Capture, normally, because doing just a Game Capture always seems to give me problems, but for live streaming I don't want to do Display Capture because I don't always want to show everything I'm doing and want to show just a window or game instead.
And by the way even Display Capture has given me problems sometimes, like I mentioned in my very first post.
 
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Sentient Anomaly

Sentient Anomaly

New Member
I just spent a couple of hours testing about 6-7 games with various settings in OBS.

In my findings I can say that only Display Capture always works, while Game capture doesn't work most of the times. It seems to have a higher chance to work when it's set to capture any fullscreen application. When selecting a specific window for a game, it seems to work almost never.

When it doesn't work, it either shows a black screen from the start, or it will stop the video on a loading screen, usually before entering a 3D environment.

I tried various combinations of various things but I couldn't find any pattern as to why sometimes it would work but most of the times wouldn't. There was no consistency. Maybe the only consistency could be that with certain games it never worked while with some it worked sometimes.

As I've seen a lot of other users reporting the same problem, I think that OBS at the moment is a very unreliable software, although beloved. I hope these problems can be fixed. I really don't want to switch to another encoder now.

By the way, I got a notification saying that my message in another thread was deleted because I was "hijacking" the thread. I think I posted saying that I had that problem too, and maybe I left a link to this thread. That's not allowed?
 
Suslik V

Suslik V

Active Member
Before starting to capture the game, make sure that you see it on the screen by yourself.

If you got black screen with any game, then try this steps: Game capture not working (under the spoiler) and make sure that OBS Studio folder added to the trust list of your security software.

Just in advance, 'Game Capture' cannot capture DX12, UWP (Metro, Store) applications in current OBS Studio build.
 
H

HPS62

New Member
Hello,
I am trying to record the Udemy lecture Videos file but I get the black screen.

I am able to record some files.
 
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