Blacks are light grey even when using Overlays in MPC

[DragonQ]

I was wondering why my videos' black levels were pants and after some research I changed WMP11 from High Quality Mode to Overlays and that fixed the problem. I then looked into ways of making black levels correct when using VMR9 (HQ mode) and found out that this was done by changing some options in ffdshow. I tried setting the input levels to 16-235 and ticking "full range", I tried removing all outputs except RGB32, I tried changing the RGB conversion setting to Full Range. Nothing works.

Overlays mode prevents me taking screenshots which is crap but worse still, setting MPC to use Overlays doesn't fix the black level problem in that player for some reason!

Anyone got any ideas?

[mark0077]

Well the way I see it, there are two options, using ffdshow, or using your graphics cards drivers. I prefer ffdshow lately, the last few builds specially as this area has been improved.

If you want to try not using ffdshow for this, output normally yv12 or whatever, not RGB32, and go into your graphics cards driver control panel and into the video color section, and set the output mode to 0-255.

If that doesn't work, have you by any chance got this problem on a HDTV connected to your PC? If so I am in the process of writing a post to inform people about some nvidia setups (and I think ATI too) of forcing 16-235 output for the ENTIRE DESKTOP and movies also but it seems only on newer graphics cards which get too smart and assume the HDTV only accepts 16-235.

Again, try the latest ffdsows, if not that, try your graphics cards driver settings to 0-255, finally it might be a problem that i describe with HDTV's connected to HTPC.

[DragonQ]

Thanks for your reply.

I doubt I have the latest ffdshow so I guess I'll try updating it and see if that works. I do not have any external TV or monitor connected to this laptop, I just use the 1280x800 panel. My graphics card is an ATI Mobility Radeon X1300 and I cannot see any options for 0-255 range output or RGB/YUV selection in the advanced driver settings.

I also noticed that a few videos behave differently when using different renderers - for example, the film I was using to test these settings last night, behaves as I described above (only has correct black levels when using WMP11 and Overlays) and another film I tried behaves in the same way. However, another 720p video I have has the correct black level in every renderer on every media player. As far as I can see they use the same codec ("MPEG4 Video (H264)" according to MPC) so I have no idea why. :/

[mark0077]

Well try the latest drivers for your ATI card, I thought I read recently that they added the option in the control panel although I would trust ffdshows latest builds better than the graphics card for handling your colors, especially when ffdshow is in High Quality RGB32 Conversion Mode.

For ffdshow, defo get the latest version anyways from xvidvideo.ru

For MPC-hc, get the latest builds also and I guess try EVR-Custom Presentation as the renderer. Should be sorted with mpc-hc and ffdshow.

[LoRd_MuldeR]

See this thread:
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=143689

[DragonQ]

The "Pixelshader in Media Player Classic" method works but obviously that's a bit of an annoying solution because you have to turn it on/off depending on the video. The "Convert to RGB32 with ffdshow" method doesn't work, as described above. Also, AFAIK, there's no distinction in my case between SD and HD video so I'm not sure if some of the stuff in there applies to me. I tried the ATI registry fix ("UseBT601CSC") but that also had no effect. :(

[clsid]

So your problem does not depend on the resolution, but on the type of video? You should give some more details about when it occurs and when it doesn't occur. It might be related to the video decoder that you are using.

[DragonQ]

Like I said when I described how it affected three different videos above, it seems they are using the same codec.