Steam Link black screen with audio and input working

[SirKLARC]

Hello,

I recently purchased a Steam Link hoping to play some of the coop games from the living room after my failed attempt at getting Steam In-House streaming to work:
https://steamcommunity.com/groups/homestream/discussions/0/485623406937358055/

Turns out I have the same issues with the Steam Link, where I would get a black screen or a static picture but audio and controller input would translate through just fine.
I have a two screen setup, and for the testing purposes I have the Steam Link hooked via a wire to a gigabit switch in my room same as my desktop and I have it hooked in the second screen while I am running the computer on the other one to see what is going on.

After consulting countless threads, I tried:

• Wiping all my video drivers completely via Display Driver Uninstaller by Guru3D, and reinstalling them fresh
  
• Uninstalling Nvidia GeForce Experience
  
• All kind of different combinations of Resolution / Bandwidth / Hardware and Software encoding
  
• Tested a variety of games
  
• Hooked the computer straight in the Steam Link and manually assigned an IP to both so that they can connect
  
• Messing around with activating Intel QuickSync and installing drivers for the iGPU

At this point I am at a loss having spent so much time on it, so any help will be appreciated. I would rather give the forums a try before putting in a ticket with Steam Support.
I narrowed it down to the fact that my GTX 970 isnt encoding the stream properly, but I cannot figure out why.

Here is the SteamLink_debug.txt
http://pastebin.com/5ebJPqwW

Streaming_log.txt
http://pastebin.com/29UV3q6N

Streaming_log_previous.txt
http://pastebin.com/2w1nGtit

Host PC:
CPU: i5-4690k OC @ 4.40Ghz
GPU: Nvidia GTX 970 + intel iGPU enabled in the BIOS
RAM: 12 GB DDR3
HDD: 500 GB Samsung 850 Evo SSD + 2 backup drives for data storage
OS: Win 10 Pro x64
Connected to a Netgear R7000 via a Ethernet over powerline adapter


Thank you

[Shadowblades]

If you're getting a black screen after booting up a game, go to your PC and make sure that the game is set to windowed mode, or windowed-full screen. Then go to your Steam Link screen and it should be working. It fixed my black screen problems!

[SirKLARC]

Originally posted by Shadowblades:

If you're getting a black screen after booting up a game, go to your PC and make sure that the game is set to windowed mode, or windowed-full screen. Then go to your Steam Link screen and it should be working. It fixed my black screen problems! :beatmeat:

I made some progress thanks to this, but games and Steam Big Picture still don't work.
As my reference I was testing it with Legends of Grimrock and setting the game to Borderlands and Windowed mode and setting the resolution after that to 720p did not solve the issue. I was able to see the game cursor moving on the streaminig monitor when I moved it on my computer but with heavy delay. The picture remained frozen for anything else but the cursor. What was weird though is that once I opened the Grimrock level editor as a test, I was able to stream at 59-60 FPS for the first time just fine with 1-2 ms network and 8-9ms display lag. When I lauched it again the second time just to see if it was consistent after having changed the game resolution to 1280x720 through the options, I was getting 4-5 FPS with well over 500ms network lag, and 15.8% packet loss. Testing it again resulted in it working just fine. This was done with software encoding.

With hardware enabled encoding and the NVENC codec according to the overlay stats, same issue in Big Picture and the main menu of the game. Black screen with audio and input passing through just fine. I was also seeing my cursor move with heavy delay, but everything else was frozen. Opening up the Grimrock Editor, the resolution was lower than with software encoding, but I was able to go down to 1 ms network and 5-6 ms display lag and at a fluctiating 59-60 FPS. This is the log from when I closed the Grimrock Level Editor and went back to Big Picture and lost all video again:

[2015-12-27 10:42:17] Dropping queued frame before encoding
[2015-12-27 10:42:17] Dropping queued frame before encoding
[2015-12-27 10:42:17] Dropping queued frame before encoding
[2015-12-27 10:42:17] Changing record window: 00080AC8
[2015-12-27 10:42:18] "SessionStats"
{
	"GameNameID"		"Legend of Grimrock"
	"TimeSubmitted"		"1451238138"
	"ResolutionX"		"732"
	"ResolutionY"		"480"
	"CaptureDescriptionID"		"Game polled D3D9 NV12 + NVENC H264"
	"DecoderDescriptionID"		"Marvell hardware decoding"
	"BandwidthLimit"		"5000"
	"FramerateLimit"		"0"
	"SlowGamePercent"		"0"
	"SlowCapturePercent"		"0"
	"SlowConvertPercent"		"0"
	"SlowEncodePercent"		"0"
	"SlowNetworkPercent"		"2.4059433937072754"
	"SlowDecodePercent"		"1.2024110555648804"
	"SlowDisplayPercent"		"0"
	"AvgClientBitrate"		"369.42092895507812"
	"StdDevClientBitrate"		"1351.6795654296875"
	"AvgServerBitrate"		"75.49114990234375"
	"StdDevServerBitrate"		"0"
	"AvgLinkBandwidth"		"100000.0078125"
	"AvgPingMS"		"14.143962860107422"
	"StdDevPingMS"		"69.214729309082031"
	"AvgCaptureMS"		"0.19657576084136963"
	"StdDevCaptureMS"		"0.1977706104516983"
	"AvgConvertMS"		"0.0035580582916736603"
	"StdDevConvertMS"		"0.037653505802154541"
	"AvgEncodeMS"		"1.1531306505203247"
	"StdDevEncodeMS"		"0.27885827422142029"
	"AvgNetworkMS"		"345.19558715820312"
	"StdDevNetworkMS"		"2963.98828125"
	"AvgDecodeMS"		"46.943351745605469"
	"StdDevDecodeMS"		"1223.515380859375"
	"AvgDisplayMS"		"-0.29674592614173889"
	"StdDevDisplayMS"		"18.439529418945313"
	"AvgFrameMS"		"12.398219108581543"
	"StdDevFrameMS"		"57.915889739990234"
	"AvgFPS"		"61.550556182861328"
	"StdDevFPS"		"13.411697387695313"
	"BigPicture"		"1"
	"KeyboardMouseInput"		"0"
	"GameControllerInput"		"1"
	"SteamControllerInput"		"0"
}

[2015-12-27 10:42:18] >>> Switching video stream from GameOverlay_MovieStream_4788 to Desktop_MovieStream
[2015-12-27 10:42:18] CDesktopCaptureDWM: Reinitializing D3D for adapter 0x99b5
[2015-12-27 10:42:18] Video adapter: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970, vendor ID: 0x10de, device ID: 0x13c2
[2015-12-27 10:42:18] CDesktopCaptureDWM: desktop duplication enabled
[2015-12-27 10:42:18] >>> Capture method set to Desktop NVFBC NV12 + NVENC H264
[2015-12-27 10:42:18] >>> Capture resolution set to 852x480
[2015-12-27 10:42:18] Dropping queued frame before encoding
[2015-12-27 10:42:18] Dropping queued frame before encoding
[2015-12-27 10:42:18] Dropping queued frame before encoding

I will need to do more testing when I get back from work, and looking at this log, it seems like the network is the issue, but I highly doubpt that it's the case because it's a business level unmanaged HP Procurve switch that I've had for well over 2 years without a hiccup until this. Plus, I did already try to hook up the Steam Link straight into my computer bypassing it completely, and I had the same issues.

[Caliani]

Same issue, same video card... tried public and beta builds. Also hooked to another computer with built in video and still could not get a working picture (mostly black screen, sometimes a static picture)

[SirKLARC]

Testing other games didn't really give me a lot of success. The results were varied, but in the end I was not able to get it to run smoothly if at all in any game that I tested.

I brought my Steam Link to a friend's place with a GTX 970 / Win10, and it was literally plug and play to get it to run. 60 FPS butter smooth gameplay right out of the box no issues what so ever. I am gonig to reset my windows 10 installation but first I need backup everything. It sucks that this might be the solution to my problem, but when I upgraded from WIn 8.1 > 10, I didn't do a clean install, so it might be a possible cause.
I'll update the thread if that fixes my issues.

[sortvokter]

could just be a faulty cable or interference.

[SirKLARC]

I forgot to update this thread, but doing a full reset fixed all the issues. Win10's reset feature is very neat for that, but just to be safe I chose the don't keep any personal files option.

I am able to stream everything at 60 FPS 1080p no issues what so ever. I don't know what was causing the issue, but it was definitively software related.

Topic can be closed.

[The Knight Argent]

So... are you going to update your review?