h264 brightness issue

[Telanor]

I've tried googling this but all I ever come up with is some bug in quicktime, which I'm pretty sure has nothing to do with this. So heres the problem: All the h264 videos I have used to appear washed out so I tweaked the settings in KMPlayer to fix it. I'm not sure now exactly what setting fixed it. The problem now is that any videos I record with Fraps and encode using x264 come out extra dark. I took several screenshots to show what I mean.

http://www.ruinvalor.com/Telanor/images/Fraps-h264-My-Settings.png
http://www.ruinvalor.com/Telanor/images/Fraps-h264-Original.png
http://www.ruinvalor.com/Telanor/images/Fraps-Raw-MySettings.png
http://www.ruinvalor.com/Telanor/images/Fraps-Raw-Original.png
http://www.ruinvalor.com/Telanor/images/naruto-mysettings.png
http://www.ruinvalor.com/Telanor/images/naruto-original.png

The ones marked with Original are the default KMPlayer settings. I dont think anyone will argue with me that the naruto screenshot looks a lot better with my settings than the original, yet those same settings are making my x264 encodes look too dark. Can anyone help me out with this?

[nurbs]

If normal videos look washed out it's usually a PC/TV-Range issue. See here: http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=143689
I assume that the game footage you record with FRAPS will be PC range. You need to tell x264 that by using the --fullrange command on encoding.
If you expand footage that is PC range as if it were TV range the colors will looked washed out.

[Telanor]

Seems like that was exactly the issue. Problem solved, thanks!