Total Media Theatre 5 - colour issues

[CompVid]

Does anyone else have colour problems with TMT5 ? Whenever I play a Blu-ray I often find the skin tones especially are 'off', usually a bit too pink and perhaps with an orange hue. The colour settings in TMT5 seems pretty basic so it doesn't seem possible to tweak them enough.

For those discs that I can play with VLC the colours are perfect.

My video card is a Sapphire HD 7850.

[Kerry56]

In the AV Center within TMT5, under the Video Effects tab, there are sliding controls for Hue, Brightness, Contrast and Saturation. You can't adjust these to suit your tastes? Even dropping saturation a little should help.

And there are other presets, besides the original settings, but I don't use them often.

[CompVid]

Thanks, but I've dabbled with those for ages and just can't seem to get the colour balance right.

Just tried PotPlayer and the colours are perfect with that (as they are with VLC) so the problem does seem to be due to TMT5.

[hello_hello]

There's generally two methods for converting video to RGB for display on the monitor/TV. Rec.709 for high definition and Rec.601 for standard definition. If HD video (Rec.709) is converted to RGB using Rec.601, the symptoms would generally be as you described. Skin tones tend to look a little too red. And I think blues and greens can get a little brighter.... or maybe it's duller.... I can't remember.

I think the renderer usually decides which method to use (and usually based on resolution), but given you've tried a couple of other media players and the colors look correct I'd guess TMT5 is probably messing with things some reason. I don't know why or if there'd be a way to fix it. I've never used TMT5.

What happens when you compare a standard definition video such as a DVD using different media players? Are the colours the same each time? Don't test with a downloaded MP4 or something similar as they're generally encoded using the wrong colorimetry anyway, so I'd test standard definition playback using something which will be correct to begin with (ie a DVD).

If the colours are the same for standard definition playback but different when using TMT5 and playing high definition, the logical reason for that is the wrong colorimetry being used, but as I said, I'd have no idea how to fix it or if you can. Does TMT5 have a forum of it's own?

[CompVid]

Thanks for the ideas - I've tried both DVDs and Blu-rays on TMT5 and other players and it's always TMT5 with these issues.

Have tried asking one of the TMT5 tech people (a few times!) but no joy.

[Kerry56]

I don't see these problems in TMT5. First shot from VLC. Second from TMT5. This is a dvd on the hard drive.
TMT5's snapshot utility isn't particularly good though, and the picture seems stretched vertically. Not something I see in playback.

[CompVid]

Thanks very much for doing that.

What video card/motherboard video chipset do you have?

[Kerry56]

I have an older card, an AMD/ATI HD 4850. I've also used the Intel HD 4000 graphics that is available with my i5 3570k processor, and not seen any problems with hue in video playback.

[CompVid]

Okay, thanks for the info.