This is a topic that's been rehashed many times in threads 30+ pages long but I feel it could use a new thread to help myself and new users with similar problems. I'm hoping this thread will help me understand what's going on as well. I've struggled with grey blacks intermittently for a long time. The occurrence of the problem has changed as the variables (video card and drivers, tv) have changed so I'm quite lost.
Here are the variables as I see it:
What I'll do if I notice grey that I think should be black, I'll play the video in media player classic home cinema. Now I wonder if I'm seeing crushed blacks. The problem happens with xvid, x264 and mpeg-2 encoded videos. From what I've read the reason media portal and media player classic get different results is because media portal uses evr and media player classic is probably using vrm9 as a video renderer. Of course I have no idea what that really means but I get that evr is the newer/better video renderer so we want to use that if we can.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, I'm just trying to get my head wrapped around the problem. I would guess that it has to do with color ranges. Computer displays accept colors values as a number from 0-255 while tv's accept color values as a number from 16-255. The same can be said of video. Some combination of the variables I've listed above are confusing either input or output color levels.
In my case the variables are:
OS: Vista 32-bit
Video Renderer: EVR
Video Card: ATI 4850
Driver: Pretty Newest (yeah, I'm lazy)
Display: Panasonic Plasma
Display Device Interconnect: DVI to HDMI
Codecs: CCCP + AVCCore
I've heard this is a problem that only microsoft can fix as using an older evr.dll can fix the problem. Is this the case?
Will the next version of media portal fix this problem?
I've dug around the ATI settings and failed to find anything about output color level settings. It does detect my TV correctly. Using a dvi to hdmi cable works better than using a dvi to hdmi adaptor.
Hopefully someone can give us all a silver bullet recipe to fix this problem. Thanks in advance for any insight into the problem and especially solutions to it.
Here are the variables as I see it:
- Operating system
- Video Renderer
- Video Card (Vendor)
- Driver Version
- Display Device
- Display Device Interconnect
- Relevant Codec(s)
What I'll do if I notice grey that I think should be black, I'll play the video in media player classic home cinema. Now I wonder if I'm seeing crushed blacks. The problem happens with xvid, x264 and mpeg-2 encoded videos. From what I've read the reason media portal and media player classic get different results is because media portal uses evr and media player classic is probably using vrm9 as a video renderer. Of course I have no idea what that really means but I get that evr is the newer/better video renderer so we want to use that if we can.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, I'm just trying to get my head wrapped around the problem. I would guess that it has to do with color ranges. Computer displays accept colors values as a number from 0-255 while tv's accept color values as a number from 16-255. The same can be said of video. Some combination of the variables I've listed above are confusing either input or output color levels.
In my case the variables are:
OS: Vista 32-bit
Video Renderer: EVR
Video Card: ATI 4850
Driver: Pretty Newest (yeah, I'm lazy)
Display: Panasonic Plasma
Display Device Interconnect: DVI to HDMI
Codecs: CCCP + AVCCore
I've heard this is a problem that only microsoft can fix as using an older evr.dll can fix the problem. Is this the case?
Will the next version of media portal fix this problem?
I've dug around the ATI settings and failed to find anything about output color level settings. It does detect my TV correctly. Using a dvi to hdmi cable works better than using a dvi to hdmi adaptor.
Hopefully someone can give us all a silver bullet recipe to fix this problem. Thanks in advance for any insight into the problem and especially solutions to it.
United Kingdom