nVidia Forceware Brightness Issue

[Encoder888]

Please, if anyone can help, I am completely desperate:

I recently updated from an ATi Radeon 9600 to an nVidia GeForce 8600 GTS, and obviously, I installed the newest Forceware drivers. I encode movies with AutoMKV all the time and I watch them with BSPlayer and Media Player Classic. I watch DVDs with PowerDVD. So here's the problem - the default brightness which the hardware acceleration of the drivers causes in movie playback (both DVD and MPEG-4) is tremendous. Both encoded and DVD movies play very very bright, the gamma is very high and annoying to the maximum. I've tried everything, including tweaking the color correction settings from the nVidia Control Panel, but that actually affects everything but movie playback. I had no such issue with the ATi drivers. I tried downloading older nVidia drivers, and they all have the same problem, going back from the 80 series from 2005 (and I don't want drivers that old). If I disable hardware acceleration the gamma/brightness is perfect, but then of course the image is really pixelled and my PC is basically unusable :). And switching players does not make a difference either because the problem is with hardware acceleration.

Basically, what I want is for the black bars of widescreen movies to be just as black as the default black color of the monitor (just plain black), and not bright black (you know what I mean), so that there isn't a difference between the two.

I haven't been able to find any fix online, I can't believe that not a lot of people have complained about this. The issue would be noticeable to anyone who watches movies and has new nVidia drivers. I'm sure someone on this forum must have encountered this issue - PLEASE, I'm really desperate, let me know how you managed to fix this.

[Tagert]

Try pulling the sliders back and forth and play around with gamma and colour settings, but put them back on the standard settings after.

I had the same problem and I just started pulling them back and forth for a bit and it returned to normal :)
Must be some bug of somekind in the nvidia panel :o

[Shinigami-Sama]

nvidia has a screen configuration tool
its not the best but its not to bad
should help out a bit

[some drywall]

Had the same problem when I updated to the new version.

Open nvidia control panel. Goto 'video and television' then 'adjust video color settings'. Under the RGB gamma tab either adjust to your liking or turn off completely.

[foxyshadis]

Try using the overlay renderer, or forcing RGB output in your decoders (coreavc, ffdshow, etc). That'll work. Not all players allow you to choose renderers, though. If your drivers are screwed, VMR9 with YUV just isn't going to show right without expanding the color as shini and drywall mention - which now creates two colorspace changes where you had only one before, unless nvidia has changed their drivers to do it all in one function.

[CruNcher]

CoreAVC should autmaticly change everything to the correct presentation (levels,brightnes) even on VMR9 at least that's my experience so far, and it's the only Decoder that does display the colormetry as the source intended it to be in that case, and you don't need to change anything for it.
All the other Decoders are gonna use VMR9 standard TV levels (especialy you gonna notice the luminance HVS trickery of Codecs like H.264 here) also those that are hardware accellerated (tough in their own applications they are smarter for example PowerDVD also represents the source as it should be but only in it's internal Player). In external Dshow apllications it can also sometimes help to use VMR Renderless instead of VMR windowed to get the correct representation and by useing the vmr mixing mode you also get Hardware accelleration support then.
Else if you wan't to change the representation for every source, i think there was a Registry entry for the Nvidia Forceware Driver that can force that behaviour on the output (DVI) for the VMR9 Renderer (read the pdf changelog).