VMR9 Incorrect Brightness / Gamma for Video

[mp718]

I have exactly the same problem with my Radeon 9250. Does anyone with a Radeon card not have this problem? If this problem is not solved, I guess you should recommend not to use these cards for MP and simply state that they are not supported.

[almostcrimes]

My problem some how "went away" while I was trying to figure out what was causing it in the first place. It may have had something to do with custom brightness/contrast settings in the ATI Control Panel not being honoured by VRM9, but I am hesitant to go back and try to recreate the problem now that my setup is working well =)

[mp718]

Could you please just look through the ATI control panel again and find what you possibly may have changed. I cannot find anything about "honoured" or "VMR9" in it.

[HenriM]

I have the same with the Asus Radeon 9200. Only "solution" as already mentioned by topic-starter is trying to mess with the brightness / gamma levels of the RADEON control panel application in "Fullscreen 3D" mode.

However the issue is that with external players this is not needed...

BTW: problem is still present in RC 0.2.0

Originally Posted by YYota

Brightness is correct in MP 0.1.2.0 as well! So it is a bug introduced in 0.1.3.0 for sure.

I tried version 0.1.2.0, with no success (i.e. the video problems are still there). Do you know what ATI Radeon driver version you used with your "successful" 0.1.2.0 setup?

[YYota]

I was wrong sorry, 0.1.2.0 has the same problem indeed. I was using dx7 at the time which has the correct brightness then when I switched to 0.1.3.0 it defaulted to dx9 with the brightness bug.

I really hope this will get fixed, I can't believe noone is investigating this issue :-(

[jorgerib]

The same problem here.

Intervideo WinDVD works perfectly, but MediaPortal has this brightness problem (version 0.2.0, using dx9). The problem is also present with Windows MCE 2004 (when playing DVDs)!



My setup:
Shuttle XPC ST61G4 (ATI Radeon IGP9100)
PIV2.8GHz 512MByte RAM
MS Windows MCE 2004

[Verbal]

I confirm this problem on both 1.2.0 and 1.3.0 using radeon 9200 SE with only tv-out to a regular ntsc CRT.

I have installed the latest directx 9.0c and Winxp sp2, all updates.

Here's my experience. Fullscreen openGL and direxctx apps used to be too bright. In the radeon control panel i dialed back the gamma and it corrected the problem. For example, space simulator Celestia (which has a lot of black) now actually looks black.

However, I notice that when playing video files, black is not black but noticeably gray, as other posters have noted. Specifically, playing a DVD rip that is letterboxed, the top black bars are slightly grey, and then the black frames at the start of the movies are very grey. The brightness is way too high, as white in the movie almost glows.

When I start a dvd or a video, I notice the brightness increasese significantly on the menu sceen for an instant, and then goes to full screen video.

What is being called when full screen video runs? Is it MP10? FFdshow? something else?

[UndaC]

I just thought I'd drop a few lines about this as well.

I recently began using MP and the first thing that struck me was the "incorrect" brightness/gamma/color.
VMR9 is not to blame for this as Overlay, VMR7, VMR9 Windowless and WMR9 Renderless and VMR9 Renderless Exclusive (ie the mode that is "silently" activated when recording or timeshifting) all exhibit the same problem.
Also in ZoomPlayer, WMP10, MyTheatre and all other thinkable applications this problem does not exist for me (or rather it's not anywhere near as bad as in MP). It's only in MediaPortal.

For an example I just watched a gardering program running letterboxed on a 16:9 display (ie black bars on all four sides of the picture).
The black bars to the left and right of the pixture were as black as can be (ie blanked out I presume) but the black on the top and bottom were grey.

When recording a snippet of the show and then playing it back in ZoomPlayer everything looks just fine, the black on the top, bottom, left and right all have the same "intensity".

Now of course you can make it go away by adjusting brightness/gamma/color for the codec or in general in the windows settings or even your desplay but problem is that it will make everything else (ie everything but MediaPortal) become way too dark.

[YYota]

Hi, I'd like an update on this issue, did anyone of you found a solution to this problem? Now that overlay is not an option anymore, I have no choice but suffer the video lightness problem. Any help or workaround to fix it are welcome!!!

Thanks a lot!
YYota