Colors seem to be dull

[AgeOfPanic]

I've encoded a movie with Gknot and Xvid. When I watched it, the colors seemed to be dull in comparison to the DVD. I know that you can't have the same quality as a DVD, but I saw another movie recently. Also Xvid and the colors seemed much better there. Much more alive.
Now I am a newbie at encoding, especially with Xvid and I've read the guide and the settingspost by Nic, but they didn't talk about this subject. Does anybody know something I could do about this?

[Manao]

It is not XviD's fault. I would bet you had another process using the overlay at that moment. Often, the colors seem differents when the overlay is used. Depending on its settings, they may appear more vivid, or more washed.

There are several kind of process which can use the overlay, one is obvious ( another player ), and two are more subtils :

- If you use windows XP, and in the directory settings, you enabled preview of movies, Windows will launch a process which will use the overlay in order to preview the movie.

- If you have an bad driver ( some Creative drivers for exemple ) which plays a little animation at the launching of windows, deactivate this animation, because it may disable the overlay.

[AgeOfPanic]

Do you mean that I shouldn't have another process using the overlay, when I watch the movie or when I encode it? I watched that other movie on the same computer so that can't cause the difference.

Edit:
Hmmm, I seem to have a patent on posting my problems here and then finding the solution by chance. Seems like my tv-out handles a DVDstream different from a Xvidstream. Had to do some adjustments to the settings of my TV and it looked much better.
Thank you for your help.

[Manao]

Hmmm, I seem to have a patent on posting my problems here and then finding the solution by chance. Seems like my tv-out handles a DVDstream different from a Xvidstream. Had to do some adjustments to the settings of my TV and it looked much better.
But if you adjust your TV for watching DivX, it won't be adjusted for DVD.
Do you mean that I shouldn't have another process using the overlay, when I watch the movie [...]? I watched that other movie on the same computer so that can't cause the difference. I wasn't clear. I'll try to explain better.

When a player plays back a video, he tries first to create an overlay, which is a specific area of the screen where the calculations are faster, because they are made by the video card. There can be only one such area at a time. The fact that this area is rules by the video card and its driver implies that the color conversion may differ. That's what happens in your case.

If the player can't create the overlay, he will play back the video, and it's the processor which will make all the calculations, and the color conversions will be done by the player.

Just try this : Install BSPlayer, open your XviD's file with it, if it tells you "Could'nt create overlay surface", then it means that a process is using your overlay. If it begins to play the film without warning, then open in parallel the same movie, and the colors should be different.

[AgeOfPanic]

Thank you for the explanation. I have noticed this effect, when trying to play two movies at the same time to compare the quality. I will take this in to consideration.
When I said I had to adjust my TV, I should have said that it's just the brightness. So that's no problem.