Remote participant only seeing light blue screen during screen sharing
complete
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Jim Ivey
In a three-participant Screen session, when one of our users shares their screen, one user can see it fine, and another user only sees a light blue screen. The latter can draw and even control the remote screen, but can't see anything that's actually occurring. When we switch to that user doing the sharing, everyone sees the screen fine. So it seems to be one particular direction. All users were using the latest version of Screen on Windows 10.
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J Sherwani (Pop Team)
complete
This is now fixed! If you experience this, please open a new issue.
J Sherwani (Pop Team)
in progress
J Sherwani (Pop Team)
complete
We've pushed out a fix for this last week which should significantly improve the issue of working within low bandwidth environments. Let me know if you're still encountering this issue, if so, please schedule a live debug session with me via https://calendly.com/j-pop/debug-session
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Jim Ivey
J Sherwani (Pop Team): It's still just as bad. Scheduled a debug session for Friday.
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Jim Ivey
I'd also recommend not marking a post "complete" until it's verified to be solved. Maybe some kind of "pending" status.
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Jim Ivey
J Sherwani (Pop Team): Update. The same person tried it on two other networks, both with low-latency and high bandwidth, and had the same problem. So it's something specific to their machine. It's a beefy laptop that should be capable of anything, and is configured similarly to the rest of ours. Is there any kind of diagnostic information you'd need from the machine to help isolate the problem in our call on Friday?
J Sherwani (Pop Team)
Jim Ivey: Are they able to screen share via Google Meet on Chrome?
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Jim Ivey
J Sherwani (Pop Team): Yes, that worked fine. He was currently in an existing Microsoft Teams meeting with someone else, started a Google Meet with me, and shared his screen so I could see his Teams meeting through the Google Meet session. So seems like other apps/protocols are working fine.
J Sherwani (Pop Team)
Jim Ivey: Could you have him launch Screen via
%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Screen\Screen.exe --enable-logging --v=2
, and screen share with himself (he can join via Google Chrome, so it's just 2 people, his desktop app and his browser). Once he's able to confirm the screen share isn't working, he can quit the app and save the logs to file and send them over. They may reveal why it isn't working for him.J
Jim Ivey
J Sherwani (Pop Team): I think we got the log file. Where should we send it?
J Sherwani (Pop Team)
Jim Ivey: You can email to team@screen.so
J Sherwani (Pop Team)
Merged in a post:
Can not share my screen.
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Chadrick Mahaffey
The other members of the meeting only see a black screen with a loading icon. They can draw on the screen and we all see each other's drawings so it's sharing some input.
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Jim Ivey
Yes, we also had the issue with just two participants. The three-participant example was just to clarify that it wasn't necessarily just a problem with the presenter, since one of the participants could see fine. And again, strangely, when the role was reversed, everything worked fine. We'll set up a time on the calendar.
J Sherwani (Pop Team)
Could you try with 2 participants instead of 3 to see if the issue still persists? If it works with 2, the issue may be related to how we handle group calls. Also happy to try to debug this with the person encountering the issue live: https://calendly.com/j-screen/30min
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Jim Ivey
J Sherwani (Pop Team): Here's the requested screen capture of the presenter's Activity Monitor.
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Jim Ivey
J Sherwani (Pop Team): And the speed test
J Sherwani (Pop Team)
Jim Ivey: Thanks, this is super helpful! Could you have John also send in a screenshot of his Throughput results from https://test.webrtc.org/? He'll have to click down into them like so:
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John Somsky
J Sherwani (Pop Team): Here is my throughput.
J Sherwani (Pop Team)
John Somsky: Thank you! This suggests a clear fix to us. We'll try to get it out asap, but realistically, it'll likely be early January given how close we are to the holidays.
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Jim Ivey
J Sherwani (Pop Team): Any progress on this? We've been completely unable to use Screen lately because of this, and most other tools are brutally bad for pair programming.
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Jim Ivey
J Sherwani (Pop Team): Tried Screen again this morning, and now even more users are experiencing the throttling problem, where Screen won't effectively share their content because it thinks their "Available" throughput is only 300.
J Sherwani (Pop Team)
Jim Ivey: I'm now working on allowing users to manually set their uplink/downlink bandwidth to override the estimate, but it's turning out to be a little hairier than originally thought. My goal is to have it out by Monday. I'll post an update then regardless. Thanks for the reminder, and sorry for the delay.
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Jim Ivey
J Sherwani (Pop Team): Were you ever able to add that manual override for the bandwidth estimate? We have a couple users that are experiencing similar problems now. Their internet connections are fast, and they work smoothly when someone else is the presenter. But as soon as we switch to one of them as the presenter, their Pop Activity Monitor "Available" drops down very low (from 20,000 to 1,000) and we just get a blue screen with a spinning icon. Sometimes they can "fix" it by restarting their computer and coming into Pop fresh, but it's become very hit-and-miss, and a significant impact to our daily productivity, to the point where as much as we love Pop, we're evaluating other tools for remote pair programming.
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Jim Ivey
One other note: The same users occasionally get freezes where the content they're sharing stops updating for remote viewers. At that time, their "Available" value in the Pop Activity Monitor has a similar drop (from 20k to 1k).
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Jim Ivey
This sounds very similar to one of the problems we're having. For us it only affects certain participants in certain directions. https://support.screen.so/bugs/p/remote-participant-only-seeing-light-blue-screen-during-screen-sharing
J Sherwani (Pop Team)
Hi Chadrick,
Could you schedule a call with me to try to debug this live? We haven't seen this before, and I'm confident that by reproducing it, we'll be able to push out a fix very quickly. Please use this link to find a time. I'm around for the next many hours, so any time today, even with short notice, is totally fine: https://calendly.com/j-screen/30min