On your streamer career, once you probably encountered the problem, when OBS display capture shows black screen. Have you added a new scene, a new device, a new display capture, or a game capture, but nothing happened. Just only a black screen appears on OBS Studio.
OBS Studio, currently one of the best streaming software, which you can use for many solutions, recording, or streaming to an internal device, not just to a streaming platform. That’s why this article was written, to solve the problem of the black screen.
This article is mostly for Windows users, if you’re a Mac guy, go ahead to this article. There’s a difference between the solutions of Windows 10 – 11 and macOS. While on Mac you need to do some tweaking on the settings side, on Windows, you may need to go and delete some folders or do a major change.
0. Restart the OBS, and the Windows
While you may find it frustrating as a 0. step, but most of the time a simple restart will do the job. Let’s close the OBS Studio, and start again.
Another step is a full computer reboot, which instantly ends all tasks, and after starting again, the program which may cause the problem will not occur again.
1. Update OBS and Windows
We know updates are crucial, but sometimes we forget about it, or we read something on a forum, that this update is a no-go, by a user like “Megatron2004”. Updates are essential, not just for the new features, but for the bug fixes. On the other hand, OBS Studio is open-source software, which is exceptional, but many people can be working on the software at the same time. So some code tweaking can happen.
Go ahead and update the:
- Windows,
- OBS Studio,
- Graphics Driver,
- Additional Drivers like Intel or AMD.
After starting the OBS Studio, you can find it on the top of the windows, under Help options.
Then click on Update Now.
On the Windows side, you will find the Updates under the Settings, Update & Security tab.
2. Select display capture method
After OBS Studio 27.0.0, the developers solved the black screen problem, when you added a new display capture. This happened, the versions of Windows 10 1903 and up.
You may still need to manually select the option, at the Capture Method, the Windows 10, not the DXGI Desktop Duplication.
3. Select OBS graphics preference
For those who have two video cards, one integrated and one dedicated. It can be a notebook, or a PC, which CPU has integrated graphics. This problem mainly is by the conflict of the two-card or we can say adapter. It has many advantages, but primarily for energy-saving for notebooks. While the dedicated card, you can use for high-consumption software, like gaming or 3D rendering.
Imagine you playing on the laptop, then that picture generated by the dedicated GPU, while OBS Studio wants to capture the integrated GPU. In most cases, Windows realize which adapter is used, but many times, Windows can not decide which one to use for OBS Studio. Therefore we need to determine in the Graphics settings.
Open up Settings, then in the search bar type in “Graphics settings”.
After that, you need to click on the Browse, end select obs64.exe, which is located at C:\Program Files\obs-studio\bin\64bit\obs64.exe .
After that, choose Options and select the High performance option, you may need to choose the other one.
On your settings, it will appear as Intel integrated or AMD GPU, but the power saving and high performance options are the same.
4. Run OBS Studio as administrator
If you’re not installed the program properly, in the program files folder, the software may face with conflict of permissions problem. It can be a read-only folder or a windows account, that does not have the essential permission to run properly the software.
In this situation, your only job is to right-click on the OBS Studio icon, and choose “Run as administrator”.
5. Turn on Compatibility mode
The Windows Compatibility mode should be one of the last tries. With compatibility mode, you can choose one of the older Windows version running environments. We should mention that this solution will use more CPU power, and it’s not an effective way to solve this situation.
Right-click on the OBS Studio icon, and choose Properties. On the Compatibility tab, you will find the compatibility mode.
Enable it, and pick Windows 8 or 7, then Apply and close the window. Now the display capture probably will record your screen successfully.
6. Turn off Google Chrome hardware acceleration
Google Chrome is a heavy CPU and RAM-based software, but that’s not why the black screen appears when you want to record the browser. The integrated “hardware acceleration” is a good feature, but again this causes some conflict with the OBS.
Put the following link to the Chrome address bar: chrome://settings/?search=hardware+acceleration
Then you should see the option of “Use hardware acceleration when available“. Turn off this option, then restart Google Chrome, and maybe the Windows reboot is needed too.
After that, the black screen of Google Chrome should not be a headache.
7. Reinstall OBS
In some way, the OBS files, are corrupted or do not have the proper structure. Maybe another software causing the problem of display capture shows black screen. OBS Studio will instantly want you to recover, or update, but you can start anyway, then a problem like mentioned above will pop up.
Download the latest version of OBS Studio, uninstall the current version of yours, then install the new one. Between the installation and the uninstall process, you should do a reboot to make sure every task ended which can be tied to OBS.
Did you solved the problem?
We are happy if you are, but if not, let us know in the comment section, a 24h reply is reasonable.
