x264 is washing out my video

[Tonpole]

x264 manages to preserve almost every detail, but gives my video a white sheen making everything appear really washed out. Are there any codecs that dont do this? Im willing to lose a little detail if i can keep my blacks black.

[Dark Shikari]

This has nothing to do with x264. Your source is TV levels but it's being displayed as PC levels, probably due to a bad renderer in your video player. This most commonly happens if you open multiple video players at once in an attempt to "compare"; only one gets accelerated by the graphics card, leaving the others improperly displayed.

This has been posted a thousand times before, :search:

[nurbs]

That's a very common playback problem. See here: http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=143689