A Tested (and working) Streamlabs OBS Display Capture Black Screen Fix

I do a bit of live streaming over on Twitch (give me a follow if you’re interested in coding and this post helped you) and while I primarily use my desktop PC, I was travelling recently and wanted to use my gaming laptop to do a little code streaming (scroll down to the “fix” section if you’re in a hurry).

Like many, I use Streamlabs OBS for my streaming needs. While I attempted to enable display capture for my live scene, my webcam was working fine, but none of my laptop display was being captured. All I got was this black screen and no explanation.

I tried everything inside of Streamlabs OBS, but it turns out it is related to the graphics in the laptop being in use, requiring OBS to be configured to use integrated graphics. While we are probably not guaranteed to have the same laptops, this fix should work for anyone experiencing the same issue. I have an integrated Nvidia 1060 GPU.

After a lot of dead ends reading forum posts, blog posts and anything else I could find, nothing seemed to work. I knuckled down and was able to fix the solution.

The Fix

Open up the Nvidia Control Panel (right-click on your desktop and choose, Nvidia Control Panel).

Inside the control panel on the left-hand side, select, “Manage 3d settings” and on the right-hand side, choose the program settings tab. Don’t worry about the dropdown, Streamlabs OBS will not be detected there. Click the, “add” button instead.

If you have recently opened Streamlabs OBS you’ll see it at the top of the list, but ignore that. The real file for Streamlabs OBS is obs64.exe select it and click, “Add Selected Program”.

Click the, “Select the preferred graphics processor for this program” dropdown and choose, “Integrated Graphics” and then click the “Apply” button.

Now, open up Streamlabs OBS (and make sure you’re running it as an administrator). You should now see your display capture working, so additional trickery or configuration needed.

Really, it is that simple. A lot of the solutions I found focused on enabling irrelevant things like compatibility mode, updating drivers for your graphics card and even changing the performance mode for the app to high performance (all of which, do nothing). I hope this helped you.