correct overlay settings.

[McQuaid]

I have a nvidia card and video sources can look very dark without overlay. I have a few friends who have nvidia cards and they seem to have the same problem. But one friend doesn't need to boost his overlay. Even a dvd rip in virtualdub looks too dark, I just know that with overlay it'll be fine.

My old voodoo3 did not exhibit this problem, at 1.0 it was fine. So I want to know how to make sure to set it correctly? Is there some screen test colour bars, with a portion of the screen that should not be seen. e.g. some playstation video games had a screen for adjusting your brightness, basically it had a screen with something similar to colour bars with a dividing line and stating that if you can see the colours below the lines your settings are too bright...

So how to ensure overlay is set correctly, or better yet is there some fix for nvidia cards so video playback is not so dependant on overlay brightness?

[phrentec]

Overly has to with brightness? I thought overlay was just to smooth and properly render the video out. Like if you are trying to play back a video and another application, like xmpeg when the overlay option is checked, takes the overlay then the video you play back just ends up being pixelated or blocky because no overlay could be used. well that's what used to happen with my old voodoo3 card. But if your videos are usually dark then try playing it back by using ffdshow as the directx decompressor and in the settings set the gamma a little bit higher. Or maybe your moniter isn't set right. try using http://displaycalibration.com/

[fellaw]

I'm experiencing exactly the opposite issue here:
On my friends PCs with nVidia, all played videos are too dark. No matter how high the gamma correction/brightness/contrast of either the monitor or the detonator driver is set, the overlay remains dark. Whenever I tried with ffdshow, the player(tried several) hang after opening the file.

[phrentec]

which player did you use? try media player classic or just windows media player 6.4.

[fellaw]

I tried several players, all DirectShow/DirectX based I think:
Zoom Player, WMP 6.4/9.0, DivX Player Alpha(the one from divx 5.0), PowerDVD, WinDVD, Sasami2k, Video LAN, Graphedit. There were a few more, but all causing the same effect. Btw: It doesn't happen with my own PC! I own GF2Ultra from Hercules, and the overlay is bright and clear!
I did a clean install of WinXP & DivX 5.0 & WMP 9 & Detonator 41.09 with the Hercules--> bright overlay as expected. Then I put in some different cards(MSI, Asus, Leadtek, all nVidia based). All caused dark overlay. VDub looks ok, though.
What irritates me is the fact that the darkness doesn't change(pos or neg), regardless how the brightness/contrast/gamma are set in the driver's options. I haven't found the gamma value in the bios of the gfx card.

Is it just a video source which looks too dark with you? Which software are you using for capturing? E.g. for iuVCR, you can set the brightness within the capture device's configure dialog of the Video tab. Maybe it's set too low.