Darkened video on WMP, Real and VLC

[Radioactive985]

Hi,

I have no idea why it happens but everytime I play a video on WMP, VLC or RealPlayer it is dark. I was somewhat surprised when I played them on Quicktime/iTunes and it was perfect but I suppose it is because it doesn't share the same video filter as the others. I have tried with multiple formats and videos (MPEG, AVI, MP4...) but it's the same. I even tried installing DivX but it shows darkened videos too. I also have Linux on this same machine and the videos work great there.

Is it a bad codec I have? How can I return to the original codecs as it didn't happen in the past? What can I do to fix this or where can I begin looking at? Any help will be appreciated.

[Baldrick]

Have you checked your graphics cards overlay settings? The quicktime player may not use hardware acceleration. You find it under the control panel->display->settings->advanced and check for video brightness settings.

[Radioactive985]

Have you checked your graphics cards overlay settings? The quicktime player may not use hardware acceleration. You find it under the control panel->display->settings->advanced and check for video brightness settings.

Thanks for the response. I checked in the advanced configuration in display but there wasn't an option named "video brightness" but I found a tab named color administration and another one named after my GPU (Geforce 6600) so I clicked there and it opened the nVidia Control Panel and then to Video where I can change its brightness. It shows a sample image to test your color levels and it seems all fine on 50% brightness (as it was).

I checked in Quicktime and it is enabled to use DirectX and hardware acceleration for playing videos. I would like to add that 3D games in DirectX work fine for me and so the tests in dxdiag.exe

Thanks again.