AutoGK Encodings to Dark!!

[HuBOC]

First of all I would like to thanks Len0x for this great app! It´s the best out there!

The only reason I haven´t started using AutoGK for my backups is simple, the final file is too dark! With Gordian Knot I edit the avs file and use LumaFilter with these settings: LumaFilter (10,1.1). And the video comes out fine!

Will you boost the brightness in AutoGK?

Ps: The encodings are for both codecs (Divx and XviD)

Thanks

[manono]

Hi and welcome to the forum-

Did you know that of the nearly 2000 replies in the main AutoGK thread that you're the first person to have mentioned this? It seems to me that if AutoGK was really making dark videos that it would have been noticed by now. Perhaps the problem is at your end. Depending on the decoder that you use, you can brighten it in the decoder. Or you can brighten it in many players. Or you can brighten it in the overlay settings of your video card.

Of course, now that there's a separate thread on this subject, any others that feel the same way as you do are more than welcome to chime in.

[tsekos]

I don't know if we have the same problem but i used to get dark video as well. On my side, the problem lies at my geforce256 video card with the latest detonator drivers. My guess is that the new drivers are optimized for the newer video cards that use luminance filters that my card doesn't support. I fixed it by increasing the video luminance (it is in nvidia advanced settings, don't really know the exact name since I use a greek version of the driver). Now it simply busts the video luminance automatically each time I use a media player (excluding windvd where I must repeat the process).

So in general, have you checked if the problem is not the enconding part but your pc, a driver, a mulfuctioning video card or even a bad monitor?

ps. I don't know how that luma filter works, but if it reencodes the video don't use it. Higher luminance decreases video quality. (More generally, the whiter the more gready for bitrate

[SirLurksAlot]

first posting here...i must say i am impressed by the level of genteel professionalism displayed by the users here. :)

also, my sincerest thanks to Lennox et al for all the work done to bring this elegant application to a working reality. you are to be commended sir!
i too experience output files that are 'too dark', meaning i have to twiddle the hardware to equal the original luminence found in the dvd 's i back-up, during playback. while i cannot speak to this phenomenon when divx is used (i encode exclusivly in xvid), i have seen several users comment on this when xvid 1.0rc4 is used for avi encoding, elsewhere (most notably on the xvid.org forum.) so this is not a unique situation.
while it isn't an autoGK problem (at least so far as i can tell, as other encoders i use produce likewise dark output using rc4), it may be possible to 'tweak' the settings auto-generated by autoGK to compensate effectively. since the apparent intent is to prduce avi backups that duplicate the original as far as is possible given the compression, this seems a thing that needs doing. i doubt the difference in bitrates will degrade the output enough to be objectionable...after all, earlier releases of xvid didn't have that issue of too dark output, and i cannot say their output quality suffered as a result of being 'brighter'.

thx again Lennox for all the many hours of loving labor you've so obviously spent on this project. ;)

[jof6]

I had this problem also. Let me tell you my story...

All was going fine - Divx and xvid files ripped by other people played well in Divx Player and Windows Media Player. I then installed AutoGK on a second computer(no DVD drive in mine) and tried ripping a DVD myself. My own rip looked very dark when played back on my main computer. I tried ripping using different encoders and settings but still too dark. I double-checked the older rips and they still looked good.

I looked around on the web - I thought that many people would also be having this problem and I'd find a solution very quickly. After many hours searching, not a lot found; this is one of the few places mentioning the problem.
I then installed AutoGK on my main computer to see if it was due to some rogue settings on the second computer. The rips were still dark. But now, the rips done by others were also playing very dark.

Eureka! I've tracked the cause to be the overlay settings of my nVidia GeForce4MX440 graphics card(as manono hints in the reply above). I had to go into my display properties - advanced - overlay and adjust the Brightness, Contrast and Saturation.

I'm only just beginning to understand these things so if anyone can correct any misconceptions I have, feel free.
I guess my original AutoGK rip was playing back using the graphic card's hardware overlay YUY2 filter, while a different filter was being used for the others (RGB32 perhaps). The filter used is dependent on the filter's MERIT and FourCC association along with other things maybe. Since AutoGK includes various filters in it's installation, these can affect the system's filter merits and bring the overlay into play.
One easy way of checking if this is the "problem" is to open your rip in DivxPlayer (I use v2.5.3), then with that on the screen, open a second instance of the player alongside it and open the same rip in that also. I think only one player can use the overlay, so if the second one looks OK then it's definitely the overlay settings that are causing the "rip too dark" problem.
If someone can tell me how to disable the overlay use, please let me know; I preferred my computer the way it used to be.

Cheers len0x. AutoGK is a great program - best ripper I've tried.

[blinkstar]

Just want to say that I also have this problem and that it has nothing to do with my video card, since I'm not watching the videos on my computer, but on my Archos PMP ... AutoGK is a great program, but it would be a perfect one if users could tweak black level ("brightness") and saturation ("color") before converting to better fit whatever screens they're going to be watching videos on ...

[yetanotherid]

If someone can tell me how to disable the overlay use, please let me know; I preferred my computer the way it used to be.

A lot of this stuff is beyond my understanding, but jof6...
If you were to install Media Player Classic Home Cinema (http://mpc-hc.sourceforge.net/) or maybe even the Combined Community Codec Pack (http://www.cccp-project.net/) (which installs MPC-HC and the ffdshow (http://www.afterdawn.com/software/video_software/codecs_and_filters/ffdshow.cfm) directshow filter, and you were to go into MPC-HC's options and set the Playback/Output option to something other than the Overlay Mixer, would that fix your darkness problem, at least while using MPC-HC to play video?