Washed out blacks

[catinhat2000]

Perhaps a dopey question.... but I've been encoding a TV show into XVID using the standard settings from the guide. When I do that, it seems like the blacks get a bit washed out -- i.e., they aren't as black as the original source. Is that normal for the CODEC, do I have something set up wrong? Perhaps something in my playback (I used media player for both the source and the compressed).

Thanks!

[foxyshadis]

The compression of whites and blacks into greys is due to "tv" mode yuv being converted via a "pc" mode algorithm. If your decoder is doing it incorrectly, you need relevel it by adding a levels input=>16,1.0,235 ouput=>0,255 to the chain somewhere, before or after encoding depending on taste. (Creating an ffdshow preset with it is probably simplest.)

Just watch out if you switch to a renderer, driver, or card that does the yuv range conversion!