Hey there guys. I have an issue when playing videos on Windows Vista that has been annoying me. I watch a lot of videos on my computer so I decided to ask for help.
When I play videos in fullscreen on Windows Media Player it fills the area that does not have video (such as a 16:9 video on a 4:3 monitor) with a grey color. I have taken a screenshot from a full black frame on a video I have. rash.apanela.com/images/wmp_grey_back.jpg
Now, I have changed the color correction settings on my video card's display driver (that would be a GeForce 6800 GT with ForceWare 158.18). The default settings produce a "grey black" as well, just like WMP background above. I know this is due to the TV YUV color range (16 - 235) that some videos are encoded with. The problem is that the PC allows for full YUV range (0 - 255), also called extended range. On Windows XP this problem was related to the video card's driver that was supposed to detect when a video was encoded with TV range and scale it to PC automatically. I believe NVIDIA's driver doesn't support that yet on Windows Vista, hence I changed the video color settings on ForceWare in order to "emulate" the PC range. 14% more contrast and 3% lower brightness (to make blacks black).
Now, I believe WMP is detecting the video is in this TV color range and is creating these grey bars in order to match the "grey blacks" from the video. Here is a screenshot that shows the exact opposite effect from the first one in this post. rash.apanela.com/images/nv_color.png (this is a 2.35:1 video, so note the grey bars from the video and the black bars from the player's fill in the top and in the bottom - this screenshot was taken from PowerDVD and PureVideo and is meant simply to show a video encoded in the TV range I mentioned). Well, in fact, if I don't change ForceWare color settings then I'd see a full grey screen on the first screenshot. That's why I believe WMP is producing a grey background to match the exact 16 black from the TV range.
Since I don't think NVIDIA is supporting the range detection and scale any soon on their drivers (and I believe that's their fault, not Microsoft's) I ask: is there a way to make WMP produce a real black background (see first screenshot) so it wouldn't contrast with my compensation? Moreover, I would like to strongly suggest Microsoft to only sign WHQL drivers that detect the PC/TV YUV color range and scale accordingly. Specially now that we have a brand new renderer on Vista (Enhanced Video Renderer) it would be nice if Microsoft pushed video card makers to deliver the best possible video experience.
I would like to thank the reader who reached this far. Thank you. And I really appreciate any help.
Andre

On Sat, 21 Apr 2007 22:20:03 -0700, Andre wrote:

Best advice... DON'T watch a lot of movies off your computer. That isn't offered to be flipant. There are many reasons why not to. If you must, there are some issues you should be aware of. To boil it down into just a few words rather than to get into a lengthy technical discussion the issue is color space. Many videos are encoded to be played back off some television set, not a computer. Accordingly since each (computer monitors and televisions) have their own unique color space, something has to give and as you've seen two main issues; Aspect ratio and black/white levels.
For some movies, often at the whim of the director, the exact aspect ratio is DIFFERENT than the common 16/9 used for most computer monitors/tvs. Even when the ratio is acceptable the bars are unavoidable unless you tinker with stretching the video to fit the window it is displayed in. So it boils down to a choice. Either accept the bars or use a player that lets you more precisely adjust the size of the window the player runs in...at the expense of introducing a minor distortion in the aspect ratio.
As far as how black your blacks are...
Before doing anything, properly calibrate your computer monitor to specs. This applies to televisions as well. Very few people bother to do it correctly. If you don't, then everything else you attempt to do in the way of making a correction is mostly wasted effort.
While quite technical, very informative, not not just another calibration tutorial, rather the why things are, and how they got to be that way. Eye opening on a broad range of topics from how digital cameras work to how the "specs" for tvs and computers got tinkered with, etc..
dsclabs.com/Image%20Optimization%20040227.pdf
As practical advice, see if your video card has/supports a profile to set it to NTSC color space or whatever standard you use, depending on WHERE in the world you live, try that. There are two main color standards for TV and SHOULD be applied to movie viewing as well since most movies are encoded to be viewed off standard television, not to be confused with videos, ie commerically made videos sold on DVD, many of which may take advantage of so-called "super-black" levels. NTSC is the standard for the states and Japan, with PAL for much of the rest of the world and a third standard for mostly Russia.

Your using the wrong approach! You need to set black and white points, THEN adjust gamma and make sure "blacks" are as black as they were encoded...something more in the arena of professional video editing. IF you don't have "scopes" to "see" what's going on, any eye balling attempt will at best be just guessing and vary widely from video to video. In other words, you would need to re-render the video or at least look at it with proper video editing tools. All the mickey mouse tweaking with some video card's drivers and/or toy color correction tools is only going to make things worse, not better.
While it is a "problem" the problem isn't with your computer, rather in how gamut was fudged in television "standards" shifting the white point. That combined with not being able to broadcast fully saturated colors due to narrow bandwidth resulting in crosstalk between the audio and video carrier signals is the real source of the problem that still is adjusted for today and is well known in "Hollywood" with them "filming" to compensate for known errors that creep in once movies are broadcast over commerical teleivsion and most worthwhile movies sooner or later are.
If all that is confusing enough, commerical movies on DVD may or may not have compensated for studio or computer RGB levels with many DVD players also making their own adjustments either adding or removing from the "black" setpoint already encoded into any particular movie.
As you can see, these issues can drive you nuts. Best to just accept that's how goofy things are.

Hint: If you want PROFESSIONAL results, use professional tools. Microsoft's movie maker and DVD maker don't even come close to pro ranking... they weren't desiged to be.
Keep in mind computers weren't designed to play videos. While they can, to demand everything be tuned to make viewing them off a computer a great expereince at the expense of what other things computers can be used for would be a major mistake.

Well, that would be so much easier with just the video card detecting the range and scaling it properly. It does correctly on Windows XP. =(
As far as the grey bars on WMP (the main point in my message), I can't control it by doing adjustments on gamma and brightness since they are added by WMP itself. I was asking how do I tell WMP to insert black bars instead of grey ones (if you open my screenshot on Photoshop you will be able to see the color information for the bars). I've been to the Advanced tab on WMP Options and the color for "background" is set to 0,0,0 RGB. So it should be really black. What is interesting, though, is that Windows Media Center does it corretly (i.e black bars indeed) and I thought it shared the same engine with WMP. :)
Watching videos on Media Center is really great, but it is a longer path to see some short videos.
Anyway, thank you for your help Adam, but I am sorry I can't accept "don't watch videos on your computer". Specially digital videos. Videos and computers are the future. NVIDIA's PureVideo has a fantastic image quality (as shows by HQV tests), better than any player I have seen. Well GPUs are like a rocket to travel from NY to London when it comes to their processing power and the processing required for videos. So it makes sense to use them toghether. And it worked on Windows XP and is now broken on Vista with all its new and advanced video capabilities. Please, Microsoft, make me believe your new Enhanced Video Renderer is more than just DRM.
Thank you
Andre
"Adam Albright" wrote:

Hi, I have exactly the same issue with my Vista Home Premium.
The black is fine in the normal window, but when in fullscreen, it is almost grey. It is more of an annoyance than a real problem, but annoying enough for me to switch my standard media player to be VLC (with a WMP11 skin).
My monitor and video card (ATI Radeon X850) are fine, this problem is Vista-specific, as my WMP11 on XP SP2 was working very well before I installed Vista.
Does anyone have a solution? Is this a known issue at Microsoft?
Regards Jukka

"Andre" schrieb im Newsbeitrag

Hi Jukka,
There are still very, very few references to this anywhere on the web and I certainly haven't seen it acknowledged as a problem by Microsoft. No one seems to have a clue as to the cause.

This is not really a Microsoft problem. I don't know how EVR works, but it takes the information from the video card drivers. A friend of mine using Intel GMA X3000 video card doesn't have this problem.
So I believe we should send e-mails to our GPU makers. Since I don't believe NVIDIA gives a "dime" about it, I won't bother (well, I've sent e-mails already, but they don't seem to read them). I'm using Haali's Renderer, it uses shaders for all video operations, quality is superb and speed is awesome (processing is done in the GPU).
"Jukka" wrote:

Hey,
unfortunately this is where my understanding of such issues comes to a limit. I don't believe that it is a codec issue, as this issue is present in all kinds of mpeg/avi/divx files. It doesn't sound like a graphics card issue, since other software players such as VLC or Nero Showtime don't have that problem. I'm glad to write to ATI about it, but I'm not really convinced that they are the source of the problem! Why can't Microsoft make software that runs on existing hardware, like the other software developers do?!
"Andre" schrieb im Newsbeitrag

I believe I can offer an insight on this problem. I, too am encountering this. I believe the problem to lie within WMP11 itself for the following reasons:
In the options menu, somewhere in the tabs there is a "Background Color" option (under the Performance tab). This was supposed to be the solution to the problem, HOWEVER, WMP11 does not use that setting on fullscreen mode. I did some testing with my "Robots" DVD. I deliberately set the background color to a BRIGHT ORANGE, and while on windowed mode, it shows the movie, with small black borders and a black background). On fullscreen mode it shows the movie with small pure black borders while the background is GREY. Is it possible that WMP11 is not reading the background setting accordingly
My best guess is that the area with the pure black and movie are the directdraw surface, or something like that and the grey is being drawn by windows possibly. Anyone know WMP11 well enough to support or reject my claims?

"Jukka" wrote:

They are. Different driver versions produce different results. :)
"NoJuice" wrote:

Maybe you have hardware acceleration enabled somewhere, then I don't think WMP will use the color background setting. This is not a WMP11 issue because I get the same results on all players that use EVR (I've tested three others already), so I'm pretty convinced. I have also noticed that when the player uses a custom presenter for EVR it doesn't fill the background with gray (RBG 16-16-16). But the video colorspace is still limited to 16-255.
As I have said on other e-mails, it is nice of EVR to "hide" the bars by using the same "blackest" level as the video (16). But having my colors limited to 16-235 is not nice. PCs can do better than that. :(