Blank screen on resize to match

[yarlyitsnik]

I just installed NoMachine for the first time on my PC and Surface Pro 7 computers.

Just for context, I do some very amateur, hobbyist, photography . I figured that being able to access the software and files from anywhere with an internet connection would be useful so I could edit while at family’s or the park for example. I also figured that while at home, it would be useful to use my Surface and Pen to edit versus my Wacom tablet since I can edit directly on the images.

I finally got everything configured and I am able to connect both locally and remotely: I used a mobile hot spot just to be sure I could connect over the internet.

When I do connect to the computer, I am having display issues. If I leave the computer at it’s current resolution which is 4k at 3840 x 2160, and use scroll bars it works fine. This is not ideal on such a small screen like the Surface Pro. If I choose any of the scaling settings, the screen immediately turns black and I see a tiny version of the remote mouse on screen. Being I am sitting in front of the remote computer, I see that the resolution on my computer has changed to match the resolution on my Surface, and that the mouse is in fact moving around.

I tried turning off hardware decoding in the cfg file as I saw that was recommended to someone having a similar issue but that didn’t help. I also tried using a custom resolution to match the resolution of the Surface, but that didn’t work. I do see that the Surface is using a 200% scaling with its current resolution so I am not sure if that could maybe be interfering.

I also do notice that the video feed is pretty washed out, but I attribute that to the fact that my PC has HDR enabled and it is probably transmitting an SDR video stream.

I don’t have this issue when using [removed] for video game streaming to my Android tablet over [removed]. [removed] is able to display the computer’s desktop at 4K and when games load at adjusted resolutions, they display just fine on screen. I was thinking it may be related to the weird aspect ratio of the Surface, but my TV is displaying the image, even at the alternative aspect ratio, just with black bars. When I initially disabled Hardware decoding and used the fullscreen and scaling settings, NoMachine did show the alternative resolution for a moment with a large black area at the bottom and then all video output completely disappeared again.

Sorry for the long post, but I figured I would give some additional detail that may be helpful.

Both my PC and my Surface Pro 7 are running Windows 11 and are fully up to date with Windows Updates. My PC has an Nvidia RTX 3070, and I had to recently downgrade my driver to the October 22 drivers as the Hardware Acceleration was negatively impacted by the December 5 and January 30 updates causing display flickering. I have an i9-9900 processor with 16GB RAM. Any additional info I am happy to provide.

 

Thank you for any help!

[yarlyitsnik]

RESOLVED:

I went into the Server Settings on the Host computer and disabled “Use hardware encoding” and this fixed my issue. I am now able to use full screen and have the remote computer change its resolution and get a working display on the client computer.

Initially, I also disabled “Use acceleration for display processing” at the same time, thinking that this was another Hardware Acceleration issue like I was having in the last paragraph above. When I got a working display, I went back and re-enabled the Acceleration option and I am still getting a working display on the client computer. It seems the hardware encoding was my issue.

I do need to disable HDR to not have a washed out image, but that’s easily remedied.

Hopefully if anyone is having a similar issue to me, this can be a troubleshooting step they can take to try and fix the issue.

Cheers!

[Britgirl]

Hi, thanks for following up and we’re pleased to know that the issue is now resolved. Would you be willing to provide logs for us to check? It would mean re-enabling HW encoding on the server (temporarily of course), reproducing the problem and then gathering up the logs from the server machine. If you’re interested,you can extract them using the instructions here: https://kb.nomachine.com/DT07S00243

Send them to forum[at]nomachine[dot]com. Please use the title of this topic as the subject of your email. Thanks!

[Author]

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