RESOLVED - Video sometimes dark - loading different / wrong codec?

[gepetto]

Using a vaio laptop to capture and edit from my video camera. The laptop is running WinXP, the capture and editing software is DVGate Plus and I'm using VLC player as my viewer. The camera is connected via firewire. Input is DV, creating avi files.

I captured video from the camera, once the capture was completed, I started VLC player and viewed the file. All looked good. Captured another file and it looked good too. I shutdown DVGate and VLC player. A few minutes later I started VLC player to review one of the files and it was quite a bit darker than the initial viewing. I checked the other file and it was also dark.

As a test, I shut down all apps and rebooted the system, reconnected the camera, started DVGate and viewed some of the input from the camera. I then started VLC player and viewed one the the 'dark' videos and to my surprise, it was nice and bright.

I'm wondering if I'm loading a different codec when running VLC player by itself and that is causing the video to be darker.

How I can tell which codecs are being loaded by the programs?

Any other thoughts or ideas are appreciated!

Thank you!

[jagabo]

With no other video programs open, start two instances of VLC. Play the same video in both. Do they look the same?

[gepetto]

Thank you for your reply.

I tried to go one more... Without stopping VLC, I shutdown DVGate, started another VLC and started to play one of the files. The new VLC player was darker than the one started when DVGate was running. Then I started DVGate, started a third instance of VLC and selected the same avi as the second instance. The third was nice and bright.

I tried to get some screen caps showing the problem, or lack of... I was successful when trying to capture the images of the VLCs started with DVGate running. I wasn't unable to capture the second / dark image. While it looked good in paint (went for the simple solution), when I saved the image all I got was a black screen. A further test again in paint looked good until I moved the vertical scroll bar and saw that the image in the dark window did not move, only the image around it. The bright images scrolled up and down as one would expect.

Now I'm wondering if I have some sort of video overlay problem. Time to modify the title of this post...

Any thoughts?

[gepetto]

brief update...

I found the snapshot function in VLC, forgot it was there...

When I do a snapshot of a dark VLC player, the image looks good.

leaning more towards an overlay problem.

[jagabo]

Media players and capture devices use the graphics card's video processing abilities (video overlay) whenever possible. But only one program at a time can use video overlay. When another program is using video overlay the program has to restort to writing to the Desktop (this is more CPU intensive). The Desktop and video overlay have different brightness/color settings. Go to your graphics card's setup applet and adjust the video proc amp settings.

[gepetto]

That was it! Thank you!

And thank you for the explanation. It took me a bit to get back to the computer. Once I located the panel and adjustment, it was an easy fix. I was able to bump up both the brightness and contrast and it greatly improved the video playback.

Thanks again.