Some users get ERR_OUTPUT_INIT, although sound works in other games

Hello!

Some of the users playing our game have no sound coming from FMOD. And our Unity cloud diagnostics shows an ERR_OUTPUT_INIT error.

Thing is, most of these users claim they have no issues with audio in other games, and I’m guessing lots of those games also use FMOD.

Also some of the users - when trying to gather info on their system in DxDiag - encountered ‘Error: Problem Getting Extra Sound Info’, and fixing that error ( usually with windows troubleshooter - https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/dxdiag-error-problem-getting-extra-sound-info/d9dfe50e-1ef4-4c65-bef5-76a687f43d2e ) helped resolve the sound issue in our game for them. But still - they had no audio issues in other games, even though that error was obviously already present.

One thing comes to mind, which might be done differently in our game as opposed to others using FMOD - we have a videoclip playing after you start a new game from the main menu, and we did not convert that videoclip’s audio into FMOD, since that might liead to difficulties in audio-to-video synchronization, so the video is just played via the Unity’s VideoPlayer component, with Audio Output Mode set to ‘Direct’. And everyone who has no in-game audio can perfectly hear the audio in this videoclip.

We’ve been trying to gather logs, and here is one of the cases. This particular user has no DxDiag error, he’s got a fresh system install, the drivers should be up-to-date. There’s a lot of audio devices in his system, but most of them are virtual.

Here’s the DxDiag file
DxDiag.txt (127.1 KB)
and the beginning of his log file, where audio initialization happens
Player_shortened.txt (48.2 KB)
(full file is too large and can’t be uploaded here, but I can put it somewhere else and attach a link, it the need arises).

The only thing that jumped out at me in the log file is ‘[FMOD] OutputWASAPI::storeDeviceInfo : IAudioClient::GetMixFormat returned 0x80040154.’ - I think this is something driver-related, but which exact device is at fault, how can it be fixed, and why does this happen in our game only?

Maybe we can do something on our end, tweak some settings in the Unity project to help remedy that?

Hi,

Thank you for all the detail.

Could I please grab your FMOD version? The issue sounds similar to the following: ERR_OUTPUT_INIT on Windows, 2.02.05, the issue should have been solved in 2.02.06.

A workaround is getting the users to disable all except their main driver: ERR_OUTPUT_INIT on Windows, 2.02.05 - #7 by talecrafter

This is hard to say as it depends on so many factors.

Once we confirm you Unity version, we can hopefully find a solution.

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The FMOD plug-in version is 2.02.04.
Unity version is 2022.3.16f1.

I guess I should update FMOD and report if that helps? :sweat_smile:

Yes please :slight_smile:

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