Codec Recommendation for WMP 11
 

I had to reformat my C: last week and now that I have all the windows updates, I have windows media player 11. For some reason, when I click on videos on my computer, the brightness on that video will be EXTREMELY DARK. The brightness settings are normal, too, and not low.

This darkness also happens with VLC. For some reason, not MPC. But I don't want to use MPC.

So: Does anyone have any CODEC recommendations?

Well if you're seeing the video and it's just dark, then you have the correct codecs you need.

in VLC, try setting the output module to OpenGL instead of the default Directx. If that fixes it, then you've narrowed it down. Your video card settings should likely have an option for brightness for video (or overlays, or something), which you can tweak.

Failing that, VLC has it's own brightness controls hidden somewhere in all those preferences.

You might be able to adjust your graphics card settings. If it has a gamma correction for overlays option, that will bump up the brightness. I'm going to be forced to tell you that it's my opinion you would get a better picture if you used ffdshow and a directshow player, though. I understand that (for whatever reasons) you don't like MPC, but have you tried ZoomPlayer?

Now that I've covered that, what don't you like about MPC?

MPC is excellent in the fact that it will play anything. I just don't like:
1. Clicking the window pauses it. When I want to goto full screen, I don't want to pause the video and unpause it. WMP11 doesn't do that.
2. I like seeing the exact time left of videos and WMP11 lets me do that. My favorite is to see the number drop.
3. When I want to find the "20 minute, 0 second" time mark, for example, using WMP11 it tells me where I am exactly when I'm moving the bar left and right.

And that's it. Just tiny things that matter to me. All the players are great. I just like a couple small things better about 11.

Good news for me though: I ended up going to my nvidia settings in the display options. I found "overlay controls" and was able to kick up the brightness to the level in the middle (from where it was at the very left). The overlay control kicked up brightness for all things behind the desktop. That is, videos. So my K-Lite codec pack is fine.

You probably just need to set up the correct renderer mode, VMR7/9, vmr7/9 renderless, Overlay Mixer, and whichever other modes that exist. AFAIK you can't do such thing in any version of WMP, so you are kinda screwed.

If you have ffdshow (or CCCP) installed as a codec, you can try setting the video output formats, codec options globally affect every player which uses codecs.

Extremely dark videos? See this thread --> http://www.gamingforce.com/forums/he...very-dark.html