Strange colour issue when burning an MKV

[baldrick45]

OK - I have an MKV file containing an H264 encoded movie with AC3 audio.

Several people have commended the file as an excellent HD capture of a particular US network TV show. I'll say no more. I loaded the CCCP codec pack to get the file to play but when I do so I'm getting the colours all appearing very washed out kinda like the brightness has been forced too high.

I really want to burn this to DVD since it is something for the kids to watch but when I run it though ConvertxtoDVD and view the results in WinDVD the same colour issue is present. I've demuxed an mpg file from the VoB's and again when viewed in any player software the colours are washed out - but here's the kicker. I made the mpg to pull it into VDM and try some colour correction. but when I view the file inside VDM the colours displayed in the "original file" preview window are perfect. But if I save it to Divx avi, the colours are again distorted.

Anyone know wtf is going on (or better still, how to correct it)

Baldrick45

[Baldrick]

If it looks good in vdm it sounds like you have a video card hardware acceleration / overlay issue. Have you tried play on a standalone dvd player or another computer? or try turn of hardware acceleration in your software player and see if it looks good.

And you have probably the best username here...

[baldrick45]

I'd have to agree about the handle Captain Blackadder Sir!

Just tried burning the DVD and as you suspected the colour is fine on the TV but ConvertXtoDVD (which has nearly always done me proud) has introduced an audio sync error Starts at approx 1/4 second out at intro going to a full 3-4 seconds at the end of the show. Purely a guess but I'm wondering of the number crunching in coping with AC3 and H264 inside the MKV wrapper is just stretching the software too far.

When I load the MKV into VDM I get a variety of errors anyway. One states that there appear to be B-frames in the video and using anything other than Matroska will lead to unexpected behaviour in direct stream copy mode.

I'm in the process of trying to extract a PCM Wav of the audio and demuxing the video file to create an AVI. I was trying to follow your own guide (https://forum.videohelp.com/topic241422.html) but trying to process from AC3 to MP3 only threw up an error. I'll run the Wav through HeadAc3he to get the MP3 by a more devious route but any recommendations for getting the video converted to something other than H264? Divx/Xvid seems to work perfectly with ConvertXtoDVD but trying to save as an AVI at the moment is just throwing up an error "The source video uses an algorithm which is not compatible with AVI files".

I have mkvextractGUI and will try and demux the video to a straight H264 file but where next for a fellow "50 minuter" - Perhaps Lord Flashheart will know!!

UPDATE: Just left ALLTOAVI chugging all night long converting the MKV to an AVI - sadly video quality is crap. Next guess might be to take the ConvertX VOB's, extract the MPG and try and remux it with the audio MP3 created as per above. but again any alternatives would be welcome.......

Baldrick45