Watch the video:

0:00 - Explanation
0:50 - Run Discord as Admin
1:25 - Disable latest technology
2:12 - Windowed/Borderless
2:35 - Hardware acceleration
2:59 - Update drivers
3:11 - Clear Discord cache
3:50 - Reinstall Discord

The problem

Sometimes when people are watching the stream, it turns out that the stream is actually black and they’re not able to see anything and sometimes they won’t be able to hear anything. So, how do we fix this?

Well, usually, if things are working properly or have worked properly in the past, then a simple restart of your PC will be more than enough. However, if simply restarting Discord and/or your PC hasn’t helped, there are a couple of fixes that we can try.

Run Discord as Admin

The first fix is probably the most obvious, and a lot of you are already doing this, and that is to run Discord as administrator. Simply right-click on your Discord on the bottom right and click quit Discord. Then, once it’s closed, we’ll either search for Discord in our Start bar or find the shortcut on our desktop. Then, right-click on Discord and click run as administrator. When prompted for admin just click yes, and then this code should start up as normal. Then, try going live and see if anything has improved.

Disable latest technology

The second step is to disable their “latest technology”. Sometimes this will help, sometimes it won’t. If it works for you, great! Otherwise, if you toggle it off, I’d recommend toggling it back on. Either way, head to the settings on the bottom left and then across to voice and video. Then, scroll down a little bit until you find this all the way down at the bottom “Use our latest technology to capture a screen” simply turn that off and try turning off “Use an experimental method to capture audio from game.” Once these two are off, you can simply close out of Discord, restart Discord the same way that we did before by clicking quit and see if the problem is fixed.

If the problem is still persisting, you can either leave these off or if it’s fixed itself see if turning them back on lets it work again.

Windowed/Borderless

I highly recommend turning up your games in either windowed or full-screen borderless as capture can sometimes be affected by that. And of course, if you’re streaming a game and having issues then streaming your actual screen itself can sometimes fix that issue though sound does sometimes stop working with that and I think sharing your screen stops on sharing at all.

Hardware acceleration

The next fix that we can possibly try is heading back to the settings followed by voice and video, scrolling down a little bit, and finding this over here h.264 hardware acceleration. Simply turn this off and hopefully, your streams should work a little bit better. You can also try disabling the open h.264 video codec up here and seeing if that makes a difference for you.

Update drivers

Either way, if you’re still having issues, then there’s a few more things that we can try. Number one try and update your Nvidia or AMD graphics drivers and see if that helps. Hopefully, that should.

Nvidia

Updating your Nvidia graphics drivers is a straightforward process and can help fix issues with your graphics card. Here’s a quick guide on how to do it:

1. Go to the Nvidia website (https://www.nvidia.com/Download/index.aspx) and select your graphics card model from the dropdown menu.
2. Select your operating system and language, then click on the “Search” button.
3. Download the latest driver for your graphics card by clicking on the “Download” button.
4. Once the download is complete, open the installer and follow the on-screen instructions to complete the installation process.
5. Restart your computer for the changes to take effect.

It is also recommendable to check for the latest graphics driver version and update it regularly for optimal performance of your graphics card.

AMD

Updating AMD graphics drivers is a simple process that can be done in a few steps.

1. Go to the AMD website (https://www.amd.com/) and click on the “Support” link at the top of the page.
2. On the next page, under the “Drivers + Support” section, select “Download Drivers”
3. Select your product type (e.g. Desktop Graphics, Laptop Graphics, etc.), product series, and product model.
4. Click on the “Submit” button and select the driver that you wish to download.
5. Once the download is complete, open the downloaded file and follow the instructions to install the driver.
6. Restart your computer to complete the installation process.

You can also use the AMD auto-detect tool to automatically detect your graphics card and provide the latest drivers for it. The tool can be found in the AMD website.

Clear Discord cache

Otherwise, there are probably a few last fixes that we can try. The first one is to go ahead and clear Discord’s cache. To do that, simply close out of Discord entirely, press Start+R. Type in “%AppData%” and hit enter. Then, we’ll head into the Discord folder and we’ll see folders and files inside it. Simply just Ctrl+A to select everything, right-click and delete. If your Discord is open, it’ll clear most of the cache.

Reinstall Discord

The end-all solution. If nothing else works, uninstall and reinstall Discord.