The video is streaming beautifully and there is no sound at all. Complete silence has a different set of causes than audio that is merely out of sync, so do not start with the sync toggles. SysDVR sends audio as 16-bit PCM at 48kHz, stereo, uncompressed — a plain, universally supported format — which means the player or the pipeline is dropping it somewhere, and the most likely causes are a wrong audio track or output device on the receiving side, or a game section that is not sending audio in the first place.
Work through the checks in order; each takes under a minute.
Check 1: Is the game actually sending audio right now?
SysDVR audio rides the same capture pipeline as the video. In games or sections where recording is restricted, you can lose audio along with (or even without obviously losing) video. Test with the capture button in a known-friendly spot: if long-pressing capture records a clip with sound, the console side is producing audio and the problem is downstream. If a particular game never has sound anywhere, check whether it needs dvr-patches — see installing dvr-patches and which games work.
Check 2: Player and client volume / output device
The boring one, and the most common fix. Confirm the SysDVR-Client (or your player) is not muted, its volume is up, and — on Windows — that it is routed to the output device you are actually listening to in the system volume mixer. If you recently plugged in or removed headphones or a headset, players often keep sending audio to the device that existed when they started; restart the client after changing outputs.
Check 3: RTSP players — select the audio track
Watching via Simple Network (RTSP) mode in mpv or VLC? Players can start with no audio track selected or the wrong one. In your player, check the audio track menu and explicitly select the stream’s audio track, and confirm the player is not set to a muted or “no audio” output. The recommended low-latency mpv setup is in the RTSP mode guide. In OBS, also check the media source is not muted in the audio mixer.
Check 4: Silence vs desync — pick the right fix
If you can hear the audio but it is early or late, that is a sync problem, not this one: the “Disable Audio/Video sync” setting trades latency against sync, and toggling it plus improving your connection is the cure in the lag and desync guide. True silence is unaffected by that toggle, so if flipping it changes nothing, come back to this checklist.
Check 5: Match versions and reboot
A sysmodule and client on mismatched versions can produce a stream with video but broken or missing audio. Bring both sides to the same release from the download page and reboot the console — sysmodules only reload at boot. The routine is in how to update SysDVR.
Check 6: Linux users — never run the client as root
A very specific one from the official notes: on Linux, running SysDVR-Client as root breaks audio. Use the udev rule (99-sysdvr.rules) so the client can access the console as your normal user instead — see the Linux client setup.
Check 7: Isolate with USB mode
Switch the console to USB mode and listen through the client over a cable (needs the one-time driver install from the client’s USB Driver menu). If audio plays over USB but not over the network, your console and game are fine and the fault is in the network path or the network player. If USB is silent too, the problem is on the console side or the game itself.
Check 8: Is the console itself making sound?
Undock the console and listen to the game on its own speakers. If the game is silent on the console itself, SysDVR has nothing to send and the problem is the game or its settings (an in-game music/effects slider, a muted cutscene track), not the stream. If the console sounds fine but the PC stays silent, work back through Checks 2, 3 and 5 — the audio is being produced and lost on the receiving side.
Special case: recorded clips with no sound
If your live stream has audio but clips recorded with the client’s built-in recording play back silent in your media player, that is a file-format issue, not a stream issue. Since v6.3, SysDVR records clip audio in AAC specifically so the files play on Windows without conversion — so if your recordings are silent, first make sure you are actually on v6.3 on both sides (see Check 5), and try a current player before assuming the recording failed.
Audio that cuts in and out is a different problem
Do not confuse silence with dropouts. If the sound is there but chops, crackles or vanishes for seconds at a time, the pipeline is fine and the delivery is not — that is connection quality, the same territory as video stutter. Wired LAN, same router, close 5GHz, in that order of preference; the full treatment is in the lag and desync guide. Run the checks on this page only when there is no audio at all, ever, from the first second.
Still stuck?
Note the game, mode, player/client and both version numbers, then ask in the project Discord or open a GitHub issue. More symptom guides are on the troubleshooting hub, including the black screen fix — the mirror image of this problem.