increasing the contrast in video clips

[tinkerbellsmyhoe]

im looking for the absolute easiest and quickest way to increase the contrast of these video clips i have...they were taken from a gig we played and they are really dark.. by increasing the contrast it makes it great. BUT, increasing it in media player obviously cant do that permenantly. ALSO, i tried virtual dub and it worked fine BUT it saves as an uncrompressed avi..the file goes in as a 12 meg mpeg and comes out as a 2 gig avi.

ANY suggestions would be great and the free'er the better. ill take an extra step if it means using freeware or something cheap.
thanks in advance.

[johns0]

Tmpgenc will do the job,it has good filters for color and contrast and brightness for example,just do a minute encode to test the results.

[tinkerbellsmyhoe]

thanks for the reply but it didnt help all that much. is there an easy way to do it? i have to chose a bit rate and i just want to keep it the same as the original. also, it seems that the contrast works differently in tmpgenc than any other program...it works in exactly the opposite way of brightness...in fact if i set brightness to -10, and contrast to -10 they cancel out. it seems gamma adjustment is what i need BUT playing with that makes it sooo grainy.
basically what im looking for is, when i open the clip in media player, and slightly increase the contrast makes the video perfect. BUT i dont know how to replicate that for good in another program.