asch

I have two desktops with fairly recent HDD rebuilds. On one machine when I watch a video (avi / wmv / etc.) the video plays back very dark. In some cases it almost looks black and white and others it is just too dark to see what is going on. I have a feeling I've messed with the codecs when attempting to install / remove codecs for other movies.

On my second machine I haven't messed with codecs at all and the videos play great.

So my question is how do I restore my main machine so that it plays back movies correctly?

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asch

As an added detail... I was trying to play movies in windows media player. To verify it wasn't the media player, I installed REAL and tried to play the same movie. In both players the video is washed out / dark.

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FriedFish

Try VLC, http://www.videolan.org/

It has builtin codecs, so it'll help you isolate your problem. If VLC plays fine, then check your codec settings. If VLC plays the same, then you might want to check your video driver settings. Maybe you have some bad hardware overlay settings in your video driver.

Dick Blonov

Expanding on this: if the codecs don't solve your problem, you may want to check the monitor type listed in the device manager. By default, most monitors end up being detected as standard pnp monitor. The proper driver (well, it's not really a driver, but an ICM color profile ) sometimes make a difference.

DB

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asch

VLC also plays washed out. I checked my video drivers and they are setup fine. I've reinstalled those too.

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asch

Can you explain more how to check this?

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FriedFish

In VLC, in the Settings menu, goto preferences, select Video on the left. Then uncheck "Overlay video output". Then test a video again to see if it's washed out. If the video plays back ok, then it's not a monitor profile problem. If the video driver settings for color correction and video overlay are ok, then it might be something else that affects the video overlay settings.

Dick Blonov

Right click on my computer, manage, device manager. In the device list, you should see your monitor. If it is detected as standard plug and play monitor and you want to try to get the proper ICM color profile, grab it from the MFRs web site, usually in the support, drivers downloads. If you use an Nvidia card, think there is a setting for video playback in your control panel. You might want to try that ?

DB

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JAMerica

I had a problem with my nvidia drivers that required me to manually adjust the video colour and image settings every time I played a video otherwise it was too dark and washed out (Under Video & Television >> Adjust Video Color Settings). It seemed my settings would not stick. This occured irrespective of the player I was using (media-player, vlc, mplayer, etc.)

I got fed up and downloaded the beta nvidia drivers and the problem disappeared.

HTH & Cheers!

Calvin

Set everything in the new Nvidia control panel the way you want it. Go into the video options, and disable color temperature correction. Now exit the new cp, and open the classic cp (use this as the default from now on).

In the classic CP, go into color correction. Under "apply color changes to" select "all" and "all channels." Now hit "restore to defaults." That should do the trick.

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asch

It appears that these settings were all set to 0% for some reason. I've reset them so hopefully they'll stick. Video playback now looks good.


Thanks for all of the help fellas!

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