PowerPoint displays black on NDI stream

I have two computers, one is a Surface Pro 4 (let's call this "A"), the other a Surface Laptop 2 ("B")


I have set up B in the same way as A as far as possible and the only remaining issue is one with PowerPoint over NDI. I have reviewed all the other cases I can find and none of them gives a satisfactory fix as far as I can tell.


BOTH machines have:

  • Easy Worship 7.2.3.0
  • OBS 26.1.1
  • PowerPoint 2016
  • Windows 10 (A has Enterprise, B has Home)


I run Easy Worship on both laptops, both using NDI - PAL 1920 x 1080 25Hz for output, playing the same PowerPoint slide presentation and the same song..


Both machines are on the same LAN, so I can see both NDI streams on both machines.


Here's what happens:


  • OBS on A with NDI from A => PowerPoint and Song are fine
  • OBS on B with NDI from B => Song is fine, PowerPoint black
  • OBS on A with NDI from B => Song is fine, PowerPoint black
  • OBS on B with NDI from A => PowerPoint and Song are fine


In short, on both machines, all is well when NDI comes from the Surface Pro but PowerPoint is black when NDI comes from the Surface Laptop.


I could could really do with some help to fix this. I am moving off the Surface Pro because its screen is defective and difficult to work with. It is not an option to keep the Surface Pro.


Thank you


3 people have this question

Bart, 

We are sorry you had issues with your presentation this weekend. Nothing upsets us more than a time when our product has failed the church in a live scenario. As much as we would love PowerPoint to be 100% reliable, we are at the mercy of Microsoft. Microsoft never intended PowerPoint to be controlled in the manner that we need. There is a reason that all other presentation products have abandoned PowerPoint integration to the degree that we have within EasyWorship. Quite simply, it's very hard! We, unfortunately, have to jump through a lot of coding hoops to get what we have now. Having said that, we will do our best to find the issue that you have experienced. Could you please contact our support directly to see if we can find a repeatable issue to track down and resolve for you? Once again, we apologize that we did not meet your expectations.

Dan, is there anyway that your programmers could transition to one of the open source programs like LibreOffice Presentations?


And I definitely understand that you guys are fighting an uphill battle with PowerPoint. You get it running right, Microshaft pushes out an update that breaks things again and you are back to fixing the integration again.

I can bring it up to them

Tx Dan Willard for your explanation. It makes sense that it is hard to quarantee the powerpoint functionality over NDI. The strange thing is that Powerpoints work great in EW7, just the throughput to NDI doesn't work. So EW can show the Powerpoints, that never fails. Just the NDI throughput.


For now we have a solution:

- Export all Powerpoint slides --> JPG's and add these JPG's in EW7

- For powerpoint with automatic transition te next slide on time period --> export to .mp4 movie --> add movie in EW7.


Feature request: The possibility to group a set of images in one item in the schedule. So add a set of images to one item in the schedule which we can navigate with 'next' and 'previous' just as with a song and/or presentation. 

 EW6 and EW7 has had the ability to play multiple jpgs like that for several years.  Put the jpg's into an EW Presentation, one per slide, to play them.


And it sounds like you might want to consult with NDI about the issue as well as EW.

There are a few things that the EW presentations can't do that PPT can do, but the option is there to create an EW presentation instead of PPT. Especially if you're just saving as jpg files.

You can add multiple images to the schedule and advance them. Drag and drop one of your images to the schedule from media, then select all the other images you want and press and hold the Ctrl key and drag and drop them on the first image in the schedule. It will create a presentation with all the images. Or, you can create a presentation and click Media at the top of the editor and drag and drop each image on the left side and it will create its own slide.

"Drag and drop one of your images to the schedule from media, then select all the other images you want and press and hold the Ctrl key and drag and drop them on the first image in the schedule. It will create a presentation with all the images."


Nice trick Dan. I'm going to have to remember that one.


Thanks

Yep, here's a training video on it. And actually, in EW7 you don't even need to hold the Ctrl key. Just drag it to the image in the schedule and when you see the short line underneath, drop it.


Creating Schedule Presentations

The problem with making JPG's of the PP slides is that you lose the animations - which sometimes is a good thing! It also depends on how the PP slides/animations have been built.

I recently ran a 19 session health series in our church hall. Because of the nature of the prrogram I used vMix for all projection (Not streaming or recording) I had my laptop running EW and PP and it was picked up via NDI into vMix. I never had a problem with it - BUT, I was not using NDI within EW. I had a second monitor connected to the laptop and used the vMix Desktop Capture utility to capture the EW output (which was PP) and send it to Vmix. All worked fine switching between 6-8 inputs on vMix with the PP always happily coming from the EW laptop via that vMix NDi Desktop Capture utility - (free for both PC and MAC on the vMix website).


We too have had some issues in the church with running PP from EW, over NDI. Mostly it works OK but on occasions the pastor clicks the remote. PP updates OK on the third monitor but not on the NDI output which also has been running the main screen.

One week this happened several times and after the service was found it to be repeatable. I was not there that day but the guys discovered that clicking on the previous slide then back on the slide that was supposed to be live would  bring it live.

They think that maybe there is not enough change in the slide to trigger NDi to actually update to the new image.


For the last few weeks I have been using the Beta of the new EW release. That is outputting to the new Alternate output into vMix quite happily but, we have not had to use PP since running that version. That will change this weekend though!


As I said, I ran 19 sessions/PPt's using the vMix NDI utility with no issues but do sometimes have issues when using the NDI output in EW. Maybe, there is an issue with the NDI within EW - but then it oculd actually be a bug in NDI itself. Glad I'm not a software programer!

Was wondering if there was any updates or solutions for this PowerPoint NDI black screen issue? We were working fine up till a couple of weeks back but now not working.. Many thanks for any help.

I haven't seen anything mentioned, but I would check to see if there were any Office, PowerPoint, and/or NDI updates released about that time and uninstalling them. It's the only thing I can think of that would have suddently caused this to happen to a previously working system.

in my chruch computer, using gpu gt730, sending ppt through ndi alternate screen show blank in obs

but in my home computer, using gpu gtx950, work fine


so my solution is install ndi application, and turn on ndi screen capture in easyworship computer

and the obs computer capture 2nd monitor / live screen of the easyworship computer.


also i notice that if the computer cannot sending ppt through ndi alternate output

ndi screen capture hx also will now working, because hx using hardware decoder, but the non hx using software decoder

The Nvidia GT 730 is not going to work for NDI it is not powerful enough. 

recommended does not mean minimum.

it just gpu that the ndi team already tested but they did not test all gpu available in the market.


gt730 in easyworship work fine with song, and play video 4k, sending to alternate ouput 1080p ndi, ofcourse it has delay, but still work.

only problem sending powerpoint in easyworhsip.

i will check powerpoint gpu setting again later.

 A GT 730 can barely handlebasic text with simple backgrounds at 720p without motion backgrounds, no foldback or alternate output displays, but not at 1080p. It simply doesn't have the graphics power to handle anything after 7.1.4.2, and definitely not for alternate output. The GT730 is actually worse that integrated Intel Graphics.

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