Wednesday, April 8, 2020

Possible Fixes on OBS Studio Black Screen Error

If you are encountering a black screen error when capturing screen on Windows PC, try the following possible solutions to work this problem out immediately.

Fix 1 – Restart OBS Studio and Computer
As a general solution, restarting software or rebooting the machine can resolve many unusual behaviors. So don’t take it as a flippant one. Just do it with patient. Also, you can check and update OBS if there’s new software release. Totally depends on yourself.
For Windows user, if the problem still exists after that, do check whether the OBS bit version you installed is suitable for your Windows system. Don’t be silly to set up a 32-bit version OBS on your 64-bit PC or vice versa.

Fix 2 – Close Other Software, Especially the Screen Capture Software
In some few situations, it’s the application running in the background that affects OBS’s performance and this is the software conflict. Close the irrelevant programs completely with task bar, especially the one regarding screen recording or broadcasting.

Some OBS users still reported that the Game Mode, designed especially for optimized gaming or Game Bar capture performance on Windows 10, may cause black issue, so check and disable Game Mode if you have enabled it under Settings -> Gaming -> Game Mode.

Another Game-Mode-alike way that many computer geeks love to take advantage of for gaming speed-up is overlocking. Either CPU or GPU can be overlocked to get an increased clock rate of component if it doesn’t ship with locked multipliers. If you’ve allowed it on your computer, disable the overlocking to see if it works.

Fix 3 – Run OBS as Administrator or In Compatibility Mode

In case OBS Studio doesn’t have the right to do screen capture, run it as Administrator. If you’ve installed and placed it on the C:// drive, you’d better change its driver permission by right clicking and accessing Properties -> Security -> Edit, and enable Authenticated Users to have Full Control.

This operation grants users to have totally permission to utilize OBS. And as to black screen matter brought by software compatibility matter, it will disappear while you still right clicking OBS shortcut and click Properties -> Compatibility, and tick “Run this program in compatibility mode for:” other Windows version number say 8, 7 and such.

Fix 4 – Switch Capture Mode or  Method
If you can’t see the capture image in certain capture mode like Window or Game capture, alter the resource option to see if it works. And for Game Capture, make sure you are running game firstly and then add Game Capture in OBS Studio. Also, running the game at full screen, but not windowed or borderless if the Mode is “Capture any fullscreen application” on Game Capture Properties. Another option on this Properties panel – “SLI/Crossfire Capture Mode” could also help to maintain a regular capture basically when your computer has two (NVIDIA/AMD) graphic cards built in. (More fixes on OBS black screen on multi-GPU computer will be detailed later.)
For Window Capture, there are three capture method options on its properties now: Automatic, BitB1t (Windows 7 and up), and Windows Graphics Capture (Windows 10 1903 and up). You should pick the one according to your system condition.

Fix 5 – Change Graphics Settings
Following solution 4 which concludes some GPU-related operation on software, this one is mainly for settings on system. If your computer is running two GPUs or you’re doing screencasts on laptop, black screen is a usual case. That’s because due to certain system update or the system settings by nature, OBS Studio and the on-screen content you plan to grab (e.g video game and display) are running at different graphic card. Consequently, OBS Studio is unable to initiate the capture. At this time, you can alter the Graphics specifications to fix this issue. The steps are super easy:

● For Windows 10 1909 or later: Go to system Settings -> System -> Display, and click to open “Graphics settings”, where you should select “Classic app”, browse to where you have installed OBS (e.g D:\Program Files\obs-studio\bin\64bit\obs64.exe) and add the app into the list. After that, click “Options” of OBS Studio and alter the graphics preference of OBS Studio app form System default to “Power saving” or “High performance” manually. Power saving is recommended for display capture while High performance is for game capture or using NVENC encoder.

● For older Windows computer with NVIDIA card: Desktop or laptop, you need to enter into the Nvidia Control Panel and then navigate to Manage 3D settings -> Program Settings to add and select OBS Studio to customize. What comes next is to select “Integrated Graphics” for common desktop display capture or “High-performance NVIDIA processor” for game capture.

● For browser capture with black display: Browser rendering often takes much sources, therefore in order to improve the efficiency, browsers like Chrome and Firefox supports and will use hardware acceleration by default. Give it a try to disable browser’s hardware acceleration to settle the OBS black screen on Browser capture.
Yep, in this way, you can keep the recording content and OBS Studio running on the same GPU so that there’ll be no black screen error any more. Actually for recording gameplay on high-end computers, there are also many decent game recording software you can rely on.

Fix 6 - Reinstall OBS Studio
Reinstalling can also be done at the very beginning in case there are some unknown bugs of the existing setup.

Fix 7 – Try Best OBS Studio Alternative
If the display error always exist even after you've finished all of the possible troubleshooting methods, you can only turn to another screencast software. Below are some recommendations:
Open source software: CamStudio,  ShareX,  Ultra Screen Recorder, Virtualdub etc.
Free software: Ezvid, Fraps
Shareware: RecMaster, Bandicam, Movavi Screen Recorder

For more details and screenshots, please refer to the copyrighted post:

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