VCD to dark

[Echoes]

When i make a vcd from a dvd it allways comes out darker than the original.

How do i change the brightness once the mpegs are made?

And also is there any way to change the brightness during the conversion process?

I use Smart Ripper, DVD2AVI and TMPGenc.

Any help would be great.

[snowmoon]

You are doing a DVD->VCD RIP and playing it back on the same TV and DVD player?

Some other things to look into... is your TV calibrated properly. If not that's the first thing you should check.

[adam]

I know exactly what your problem is.

Tv's and PC's use different luminence ranges. The tv's range is more limited than the PC's, and so when video is encoded into its final form, for tv playback, the luminence ranges are compressed to conform to the tv's specifications. Since you have a DVD source, the luminence ranges have obviously already been compressed, since the DVD was created for tv playback. By default, TMPGenc compresses the luminence ranges, sow what you are doing is compressing your luminence ranges again without knowing it. The most common symptom of this overcompression is an overall darker picture. Sometimes it becomes so dark that you can't even see anything at all.

So you have two options, either of which will produce the same effect.

1) In DVD2avi set the Video/colorspace to RGB and the Video/YUV->RGB setting to pc scale and then encode normally in TMPGenc. What this does, is stretch the luminence range out to 0-255 (pc scale) and then when you encode in TMPGenc you compress it back down to 16-235 (tv scale) which is where it started at.

2) In DVD2avi set the Video/colorspace to RGB and the Video/YUV->RGB setting to tv scale and in TMPGEnc go to the Quantize Matrix tab and check the box titled, "Output YUV Data as Basic YCbCr not CCIR601. What this does is preserve the original luminence ranges of the source DVD, and then tells TMPGenc to not compress the ranges any further, thereby giving you the same luminence range as your source.

[Echoes]

Thanks for the info will give it ago.

But is there anyway to fix the ones ive already made?

[adam]

Well you can adjust the controls on your television to see if you can brighten the image, but if you have over compressed your luminence ranges that this probably won't help all that much. You could re-encode your video and apply a color correction filter, but you will lose quality just by re-encoding.