A couple of questions.

First... are you streaming this from the desktop mode, or in gaming mode? If in gaming mode, have you installed anything like Decky Loader or whatever that might be mucking with gamescope?

Second.. you're saying it always gave you the black screen before? That input would go through, but streaming itself wasn't ever working previously?

If so, that actually suggests in this case the message is working correctly: the inability to capture (getting a blank screen) suggests that Steam's not able to engage properly with pipewire to capture the screen.

Either way, if you can get the streaming_log.txt off of the Steam Deck itself, that would be helpful. It should have some diagnostic lines about the capture process in it.

I am streaming from desktop mode. I do not have deckyloader installed.

I used to have a steamdeck lcd and this wasn't an issue, now with my OLED it is an issue. I started getting no image on the screen, and then last week I started seeing it stop taking inputs and tell me this message. I'll try to get the log later today.

Okay, so on the plus side, this is actually *correctly* detecting what's going on in desktop mode! There's a failure to capture things to send you, so the error message is correct! Previously this just didn't get detected, so while inputs would continue to be sent the rest of the stream never finished initializing (and also never errored out). So the actual failure case you're seeing hasn't changed, just that Steam is now detecting it and the Steam Link client is able to display a message about it.

If you quit Steam, and then run it from the command-line with "steam -pipewire-dmabuf", you should get a permissions dialogue asking to let you capture the screen. If it does, and you approve that permissions request, does it stream correctly?

If so, then the issue is simply that in desktop mode, Steam isn't starting up in Pipewire capture mode...

Okay I found the logs and moved them to my desktop PC, how should I share them?
And what command do I use to run steam like that? I tried to add it as a launch argument for a shortcut like I do on windows, or the "launch in terminal" option for the same, but it told me I don't have write permissions.
Ideally the message shouldn't kill inputs, it's hard to fix this when my keyboard and mouse stop going through every ten seconds and I have to reset the stream.

Originally posted by Adil3tr:

Okay I found the logs and moved them to my desktop PC, how should I share them?

You can throw them on pastebin or gist or whatever and link them here.

Though I think we actually found the issue while investigating earlier today. There's a twofold problem -- first, Pipewire simply doesn't want to work right for capture on desktop mode for the Deck if the Deck is running a Wayland session versus X11. And second, the beta builds for the Deck appear to have maybe inherited a setting that switches the default desktop environment from X11 to Wayland.

I suspect if you switch the desktop session back to X11 manually, capture will work correctly for you until the Pipewire issue can get fixed for Wayland desktop mode.

https://mega.nz/file/rxlTDahQ#1q0L9X-Cqtz5SLHY9i1yDSOrDQJccfxaXUR15kVbaCg

I will find out what X11 is and see if I can try that. I know VR minutia but nothing about linux.

After entering that into terminal, it seems to work! Thanks. It's laggy, but that's probably just my network.

Originally posted by Packetdancer:

Originally posted by Adil3tr:

https://mega.nz/file/rxlTDahQ#1q0L9X-Cqtz5SLHY9i1yDSOrDQJccfxaXUR15kVbaCg

Yeah, the "Desktop Black Frame" capture method in that log is a dead giveaway that it's gone sideways. That's the fallback "I cannot generate any frames to send, aaaaaa, panic" method that just generates empty black frames for a stream. :)

Originally posted by Adil3tr:

I will find out what X11 is and see if I can try that. I know VR minutia but nothing about linux.

steamos-session-select plasma-x11-persistent

at a command prompt should switch you to the X11 version of KDE Plasma (the desktop environment) instead.

If you want to use Wayland again for some reason,

steamos-session-select plasma-wayland-persistent

will get you back on the Wayland version of KDE Plasma.

Uhhh… does this mean that now my steam deck will always boot into desktop mode? Because that seems to be happening all of a sudden even if I restart it while it’s in game mode.

Originally posted by Adil3tr:

Uhhh… does this mean that now my steam deck will always boot into desktop mode? Because that seems to be happening all of a sudden even if I restart it while it’s in game mode.

Oh! Sorry, I misunderstood; since you were streaming in desktop mode, I assumed you were booting into desktop mode by default, so I had you switch which type of desktop session it boots to. "Persistent" sets an override meaning "always boot into this."

Just do...
...to clear your override and go back to the default. Then when you go to desktop in the future, if things are broken you can...
...to switch to X11 for that session *without* changing the boot default.