brightness in VLC vs Apple DVD player?

[edwinbradford]

If I view the same DVD in Apple's player and VLC it has completely different brightness. In fact Apple's player is so dark the footage is almost useless. Does anyone know why this is and if there's any hack for adjusting it. Also, VLC does have filters for adjusting hue, contrast and brightness but when I switch them on I get weird unusable results. Anyone had any experience of this?

[WiseWeasel]

The only workaround is to make a separate display color profile (in the Color tab of the Display System Preferences panel) just for DVD playback, decreasing the gamma. Send feedback to Apple requesting brightness adjustment in DVD Player if you want this addressed.

[edwinbradford]

Hmm, I see what you're saying, interesting. It's certainly a hack. Seems to me though that if two different players are interpreting digital data with differing brightness settings then one of them must be doing it wrong. In this case it seems to be Apple's player.

[WiseWeasel]

It's not a question of right or wrong. It's just that Apple's default gamma is different than the one on PCs, and the makers of VLC just adjusted their display brightness to compensate. The video you capture on a Mac will also look a lot darker than on a TV set, but when you output to a standard format for TV playback, it will look normal again. It's good to keep the brightness consistent across apps, so that you can make sure nothing strange is going on when you do a bunch of video conversions. If you capture in a QuickTime format, export to MPEG2 or something, and then use VLC to verify it, you might wonder why the video just got a lot brighter, where as keeping it consistent helps color accuracy checking a lot. If you want to adjust your gamma to make all video brighter, that's fine, but at least it will keep it consistent across apps. It would be bad for DVD producers if the standard brightness for DVD Player was increased, but not the rest of the video played back via QuickTime. Color consistency is very important. I think the display profile route will be the only way to assure accurate color display between various apps. Apple might add a way to adjust brightness in DVD Player in the future, but I hope they make it obvious where the default level is, so that people who work with video don't get confused. For that reason, VLC is not a good tool for checking the output of your video conversions.

[edwinbradford]

Oh thanks, that's a good answer. I'm not very good on video formats, actually I use VLC to capture screen grabs from video games for display on screen and in print. Any kind of capture through Apple's player loses information in the dark areas whereas VLC seems to represent it more accurately. But I guess that's because I'm not exporting back to video output again. As you say, a brightness control or gamma control within Apple's player would help but as Apple seem intent on locking users out of the whole screen shot process from DVD anyway I guess I'll stick with VLC.

[deadsierra]

Oh thanks, that's a good answer. I'm not very good on video formats, actually I use VLC to capture screen grabs from video games for display on screen and in print. Any kind of capture through Apple's player loses information in the dark areas whereas VLC seems to represent it more accurately. But I guess that's because I'm not exporting back to video output again. As you say, a brightness control or gamma control within Apple's player would help but as Apple seem intent on locking users out of the whole screen shot process from DVD anyway I guess I'll stick with VLC.

I doubt that the information is lost with DVD Player. Try opening a screen in Photoshop and crank up the brightness. You'll most likely see the details you want.

[WiseWeasel]

I know the information is not lost. I capture in iMovie, encode with QT to DVD format, and preview with DVD Player, and the color is consistently dark on the Mac. Then, once I watch the DVD on a TV, it looks as bright as the original content I captured from TV.