How do I lighten up a video?

[Bill Clo]

I recently got a downloaded video of Firefly, and the picture is really dark, much darker than I remember from watching it on TV. I tried fiddling around with the brightness slider in DivX5 playback, and it didn't really help much.

Is there another way to make it easier to see?

[OvERaCiD23]

download ffdshow (in downloads section) and use it for playback. it's simply a decoder for video (not a codec), but it offers many more features than the native DivX5 playback filter. try it, you should be able to brighten the picture up quite a bit.

[Snakeisthestuff]

you can also change the brightness in your desktop properties - under overlay-settings.

[Bill Clo]

I was unable to get to underlay settings. Those options are greyed out, and I am not sure why.

Tried the ffdshow download, and while it shows up in Windows media player as an available format, and I can access it, the player doesn't seem to use it, as the brightness isn't changed as far as I can tell.

Too bad people can't make sure the video is watcheable before they distribute it on the Net...

[markrb]

If it's a fairly large AVI, say over 300mb's for the 42 minute or so epsisode you could covert it to a VCD using DVD2SVCD and add in Donald Graft's Tweak filter. I use it all the time to convert Buffy and Angel eps that are too dark.
If you need the ini for DVD2SVCD and the Tweak filter and VCD I already made it so I can just post it if you want to try to convert it.

I don't play with Avi - Avi conversion so I can't help much.
Maybe Vdub can do luminance as well? I don't know.

I just checked it out and Vdub does have a contrast/Brightness filter as well as a luminence filter. So you could load it into Vdub, adjust it to where you like, then save the adjusted avi.


Mark

[Bill Clo]

I do believe that you are right about Vdub. I forgot all about that possibility. I'm not crazy about reprocessing avi to avi, but it would probably be the easiest way to go about it, since I'm only moderately experienced at video encoding.

Thanks.

[Snakeisthestuff]

ok i think you mean overlay settings *g*
try to start the movie.. let it play, and open the desktop properties while your avi is playing, in my case it solved the problem with the greyed-out options. hope it helps you too.