[Windows] Black Screen while screen sharing
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Nivesh Ravindran
On windows I also get a black screen when I am screen sharing. I can view other people's screen sharing without issue but if I screen share I get a black screen and I can't bring any programs in front of it.
I've reinstalled, also cleared roaming and local appdata and reinstalled and it has the issue every time I screen share.
I made a video to show what happens
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J Sherwani (Pop Team)
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We've recently released a fix for this. Let us know if you're still having issues.
J Sherwani (Pop Team)
Nivesh & Klemen,
The black screen indicates that your system isn’t capable of showing transparent windows. There are two things you can try:
1) Try running Pop with the flag --disable-gpu — if this works, while it’s not an ideal solution, it would at least give us a clue as to what may be going wrong.
2) Try updating your video/graphics card drivers to the latest version.
Let me know what you find. If possible, we can also try to debug this together live — if that works, please find a time via https://calendly.com/j-pop/debug-session.
Thanks! We should hopefully be able to get you up and running very quickly.
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Nivesh Ravindran
J Sherwani (Pop Team): In relation to graphics, I am no longer using the computer where I was having the issue as my primary work computer but I will give it a try when I get a chance and get back.
Something that may be of interest is that I use an External GPU.
Without having any changes to settings It was working flawlessly for a while and then out of nowhere it started having the issue shown in the video.
Also I will update my software and see if the issue is still there and I would be happy to go through a debug session to help find out the cause.
J Sherwani (Pop Team)
Nivesh Ravindran: Good to know. Which external GPU is it? If you can share a link to the exact item, we can look into acquiring it so we can potentially reproduce this internally. Thanks!
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Klemen Slavič
J Sherwani (Pop Team): I figured out what causes the problem.
With a dual-monitor setup, if I start screensharing when the main window is on my primary monitor, the overlay works correctly. If I attempt to start screen sharing by moving my main window to my second monitor and clicking Share Screen, the black (or today, gray) rectangle overlay problem appears.
The workaround is to always keep the chat window on the primary monitor when starting screenshare, I guess, but at least it's a workable solution for the time being.
Oh, and to be clear, that's with or without
--disable-gpu
.J Sherwani (Pop Team)
Klemen Slavič: Thanks a lot for the detailed feedback! Just so we have all the data in one place:
- We did a live debug session where Klemen demonstrated the issue to me
- Everything initially seems to work normally
- However, moving the Pop primary window (when in a call) to the secondary monitor and then starting a screen share results in the overlay window being unable to display transparency anymore, which results in an odd screen selection UX, but a terrible in-screen-share experience where the entire shared screen is black, other than the secondary call window.
- Graphics card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti
- Monitors: 2x DELL U2715H(DisplayPort|miniDisplayPort)
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Klemen Slavič
It also does the same thing for me. I have a dual-monitor Windows 10 setup that just shows a green rectangle with black fill on the screen I select to share. It prevents me from being able to use Pop to share my screen.