Issue: Black or frozen screen when sharing screen in Skype for Business 2016

Issue:

Skype for Business Windows client displays a black screen (or a black screen with a mouse cursor) during screen sharing and/or crashes during a screen share.

Details:

Since Skype for Business 2015 Cumulative Update KB3061064. Video-based Screen Sharing (VbSS) was introduced to replace the legacy RDP screen sharing method. VbSS also referred to as P2P sharing makes use of the UDP protocol. Although Microsoft claims this capability will improve screen-sharing experiences, a number of organizations have had issues with black screens as described above. Microsoft has suggested upgrading to Skype for Business 16.0.6741.2025 to remediate this issue but a number of reports have stated this upgrade did not provide a resolution.

Resolution:

The current resolution is to disable VBSS, and then enable Microsoft Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP)-based screen sharing. To do this, make the following change in the registry.

Registry location: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Lync
DWord name: EnableP2PScreenSharingOverVideo
Value data: 00000000

Additionally, if you use the 32-bit version of Skype for Business 2016 on a 64-bit operating system, add the following subkey:

Registry location:HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Lync
DWord name: EnableP2PScreenSharingOverVideo
Value data: 00000000

If the issue occurs during a conference, make the following change in the registry.

Registry location: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Lync
DWord name: EnableConferenceScreenSharingOverVideo
Value data: 00000000

Additionally, if you use the 32-bit version of Skype for Business 2016 on a 64-bit operating system, add the following subkey

Registry location: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Lync
DWord name: EnableConferenceScreenSharingOverVideo
Value data: 00000000