Virtual Cam output gets distorted and turns greenish

[bobvanvliet]

For Microsoft Teams at least, the platform will only support 1920x1080 at 30fps. Hardcoding both of those settings for my cameras has made OBS rock solid and no more green screen of death!

Setting output resolution in profile/settings to 1920*1080 at 30fps fixed this issue for me as well.

At 1280*720 the green glitch in MS Teams happened every time (but I never encountered it in Zoom or elsewhere).

I'm using the native virtual camera in OBS 26.1.1

 

[jgladness]

@bobvanvliet 's solution is exactly correct. Go to your Video Settings and change the Output resolution to 1920x1080@30fps. It fixed the issue immediately I was having with the "green screen"/"green filter" with MS Teams. No other app had this problem.

 

[berkon]

This is a very serious issue for us as well, because we are also using Teams Live Event and transmit from our company studio to very big audiences. Very embarrassing sometimes. Another site in our company which uses a similar setup gave us the advice to not use the built in virtual camera of OBS, but instead use "old" virtual camera plugin. To be honest I doubt that the code is so much different, but at least they claim that they did not have the green-screen issue with that plugin. I can't tell whether it really helps, because we didn't have that many events since then, and since I'm still a little afraid, I' mostly using the NDI virtual camera. Fortunately we didn't have the issue with that one, but maybe we were just lucky. I always have a bad feeling when having our CEO in front of the camera and transmitting via Teams. :-(

BTW: We are always running on 1920x1080 at 30fps, so the hint above unfortunately does not help.

 

[ana_pofuk]

Hi
this is happening for me too, but only on Teams, to the point OBS being unusable for anything serious.
I'll try the hack from above.

 

[janita]

This is a major issue for us as well. We use Teams Live Event for online events all the time. I used to be able to use the OBS Virtual Camera for the entirety of an event without any issues. Now it has a big green glitch from the get go and doesn't go away. I cannot use this plugin until there is a fix. Has there been an update on this?

 

[konsolenritter]

Have you tried the hints given above?

 

[dtoux]

Since I've originally posted about this issue at some point it went away. I thought it was fixed in one of the versions of OBS (I'm at 27.0.1 right now). But then I realized that when I was switching my camera and at some point, I configured "Output (Scaled) Resolution" in the video settings to be equal to "Base (Canvas) Resolution" effectively disabling scaling. Previously, I was downscaling the video to 720p. This is consistent with @bobvanvliet 's observations. So I suspect the issue is with the scaler. It would be interesting to try if different downscaling algorithms make any difference (I was using Lanczos) ...but if you are looking for just a workaround - this was rock-solid for me for at least a year - not a single occurrence of the green screen and I use OBS with Teams 2-6 hours a day.

 

[JGayle]

We had the "green slime" screen also happen to us at least once at the beginning of several Live Events recently and one time it happened a few times. We stopped and restarted the OBS Virtual Camera within Teams and solved it. However, this is not a suitable situation. We are downscaling OBS to 1280x720x30 because our testing showed that downscaling into Teams (which outputs 1280x720) gave better quality image than if we blasted Teams with the highest quality setting. So playing with the scaler doesn't seem to be a good scenario for us since the quality of the Live Event broadcast is better with a lower quality output from OBS. I have uploaded the log files from one of the days when the green slime happened. I am not good at reading this and determining what happened and what we can do to prevent it. Is there another setting we should look at? Should we use the "old" virtual camera plugin?

 

[TK-093]

I still get the green screen of death. I've installed the virtual cam module and use that and have not run into that issue since then.

 

[JulesMCC]

Thanks for the insight on how to possibly prevent the 'green garbled screen of virtual cam' from occurring. Its not a major problem for me as I predominantly use OBS to give me more control of my image in video conference meetings. Someone will mention my video has gone funny and a quick off and on of the virtual cam resolves it. Mostly they are MS Teams based, but I do join 3rd party's meetings that might use Zoom, BlueJeans, GoToMeeting etc etc.

Occassionally I will host or participate in a webinar where it is more annoying.

Will report back any findings I have but the initial feedback is that my video quality is not compromised, at least not so much that my colleague could tell from before the adjustment to the Video OUTPUT RESOLUTION.

 

[Videobuff]

Just curious....are you not seeing significant degradation of your video stream when using OBS virtual cam, and I especially mean with any text? I've not been able to use the OBS Virtual Cam for this reason, i.e., the image everyone else sees is just too blurry and degraded, text being almost impossible to read even though it seems fine on my side. I believe the issue is that platforms such as Teams, Zoom, etc, downscale the virtual cam transmission, so no matter what I do it seems like using virtual cam isn't going to be an option, especially if text is involved. Have you or anyone else found a solution for using virtual cam without the image being blurry and degraded, and allowing text to be transmitted cleanly?

 

[Satch]

If anyone is still having this problem, I fixed it by going to Settings>Advanced>Video Section -- Set "Color Range" to "Limited" instead of Full. Up to that point, none of the other solutions posted here had worked for me.

I hope this helps!

 

[oschi69]

If anyone is still having this problem, I fixed it by going to Settings>Advanced>Video Section -- Set "Color Range" to "Limited" instead of Full. Up to that point, none of the other solutions posted here had worked for me.

I hope this helps!

Thank you for that, it works perfectly for me.

 

[Satch]

Thank you for that, it works perfectly for me.

No problem, glad it worked! It was very frustrating trying to figure this out...

 

[verheirstraetentom@gmail.]

I had the same issue and after trying everything said above it was still occuring. I saw Streamlabs desktop was running on my nvidea GPU (GPU - 01 in task manager) and Teams was running on my integrated GPU (GPU - 0 in task manager). I fixed it by forcing teams to use the NVidea GPU, which is a more powerful one.

You can do this to find the path to your teams.exe (easily done by right clicking your teams process and clicking show file location) and adding that path to your Settings > Display > Graphics (scroll to bottom on windows 11). Once there you can add an app. After you can find your app in the list and change the options to use the Nvidea GPU. Hope this can help some people out

 

[mgraham224]

If anyone is still having this problem, I fixed it by going to Settings>Advanced>Video Section -- Set "Color Range" to "Limited" instead of Full. Up to that point, none of the other solutions posted here had worked for me.

I hope this helps!

I created an account here simply to post and thank you for this advice. I wish I had read it before everything else in this thread. Thank you!

 

[SilvaShadow1990]

Currently having this issue with facebook messenger, my friend is able to use Virtual Camera with zero issues. when I use it, I get a frozen image and green flashing. My color range is set to 'Limited' my resolution is 1920x1080, (as my friend's is set the same way.) and it just won't work.