OBS Studio Portable Deployment with Fullscreen projector give a gray projector preview screen.

[tinodo]

I am deploying OBS Studio in Portable Mode alongside a profile and scene collection. Part of the setup procedure is to add a Fullscreen Projector to the scene configuration json file. I get the proper geometry and monitor number, and add it to the config. Something like this:

    "saved_projectors": [
        {
            "alwaysOnTopOverridden": false,
            "geometry": "AdnQywADAAAAAAeKAAAAAAAADiAAAAO1AAAHgAAAAAAAAA4qAAADvwAAAAIABAAABqsAAAeAAAAAAAAADioAAAO/",
            "monitor": 2,
            "type": 2
        }
    ],

After launching OBS Studio, the Fullscreen Projector is enabled on the proper screen, but the screen is bank/gray.
If I stop the projector and then re-enable it, it works. There is NO CHANGE to the scenes JSON file. (e.g. the saved_projectors contains the exact same content, so it's not in the geometry or something like that.)
What's also strange is that when I add the same projector twice to the config, it works...:

    "saved_projectors": [
        {
            "alwaysOnTopOverridden": false,
            "geometry": "AdnQywADAAAAAAeKAAAAAAAADiAAAAO1AAAHgAAAAAAAAA4qAAADvwAAAAIABAAABqsAAAeAAAAAAAAADioAAAO/",
            "monitor": 2,
            "type": 2
        },
        {
            "alwaysOnTopOverridden": false,
            "geometry": "AdnQywADAAAAAAeKAAAAAAAADiAAAAO1AAAHgAAAAAAAAA4qAAADvwAAAAIABAAABqsAAAeAAAAAAAAADioAAAO/",
            "monitor": 2,
            "type": 2
        }
    ],

Hence, I think this project configuration is stored or referenced somewhere else as well. Any ideas what I am missing?

 

[tinodo]

I found that any saved projector will produce that black screen after restarting OBS Studio...
Reproduce:
File --> Settings --> Save projectors on exit
Enable Fullscreen projector preview
Exit OBS Studio
Start OBS Studio (You will see that the projector produces a black/gray screen.)

 

[lazer]

I appreciate your work-around! Hovering over the OBS icon in the taskbar, you see two projectors: a gray one and a good one. Here's a guess: maybe there's some sort of race condition where the slight delay to build the first projector causes the second one to be just fine. Since the second one is placed on top of the first one, you don't see the gray one.

 

[Steven Michael]

I've seen this problem pop up recently as well. I'm using portable mode as a second instance of OBS to run some live captions into a meeting room separate from the streaming instance of OBS. It uses a full screen projector to a specific video output. Just as OP mentioned, the projector is just a gray screen when I start up that portable instance. But if I close the projector and reopen it, everything is fine.

 

[lazer]

I've noticed, from the reports of this issue that I've seen, that many seem to be running 2 instances of OBS, one installed and one portable. I know that I am. I thought that might have something to do with it. So I installed 2 instances on a second machine. The second machine did not manifest the issue.

I then thought that maybe it had something to do with the scenes, so I saved the scene info and see if I can reproduce it on the second machine using the same scenes. Transferring the scenes from the first system with the problem to the second system without the issue did not transfer the issue.

I then uninstalled OBS on the system with the issue while keeping the settings and scenes (located in AppData\Roaming) untouched, edited the json file to remove the duplicate projection (previous workaround), and then reinstalled a fresh copy of OBS Studio 28.1.2. The issue no longer exists on that system.