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VLC picture has become dark somehow for me. It used to work fine but then a few days ago i tried playing a file and the video was very dark. Then i tried files i had played before and they too had become dark. Other media players work fine with bright pictures. Ive tryed adjusting the brightness in VLC but the picture still stays darkish or then becomes too white.

Reset your preferences and cache.

i did that when installing the new version but still no better. only thing that helped a bit was turning the brightness up (atleast makes it so you can see something if the video has something pretty dark like scenes at night) but its still not the same as it used to be.

Sometimes this is associated with video output modules; try a different one, the recommend one is "DirectX video output".

you ight also want to try some other video output modes.

As I see that other media players work fine, there is no problem with DirectX. but to be on the safer side, update/reinstall all drivers.

Sometimes this is associated with video output modules; try a different one, the recommend one is "DirectX video output".

tried this but didnt help. I guess ill have to try installing new drivers. The weird thing is VLC used to work just fine before and seems as if some "darken" mode or something is on when i play the files (they are watchable if i manually turn brightness up so i can actually see the picture but still that makes the quality pretty bad since you can see its been brightened manually). Are there any other suggestions on what i might try to fix this problem?

When you delete the preferences and cache it's probably best to do this through the vlc Application data folder (C:\Documents and Setting\Use (you)\Application Data ("Show hidden files and folders")\vlc. Delete the entire "vlc" folder). Report back if this works, if not then we'll see what else can be done to fix the problem.

Tried it but didnt help. I also noticed that when I take a snapshot the picture I get has good quality and normal lighting unlike the video. Hope this helps in figuring out what could be wrong.

Change output modules in preferneces, video

Change output modules in preferneces, video

already suggested and tried above.

When using DirectX Vlc picks up the the Video cards Overlay settings. You can adjust the Brightness, color, contrast, etc from there and all players should be the same. Be for you start, it would be smart to reset your video card for OpenGL, Color, Direct3D and Overlay using the utilities for the card.

I adjusted the brightness for video using Nvidia control panel and was able to get the image better than any other way before. This only adjusted the image for VLC which is good so the image in other players (which was fine) was not effected. Its pretty close to how it used to be before so should be fine for now. Thanks for all your help.

This worked for me, dead easy to do and no need to reinstall video drivers and all that hassle:

Right click on the NVIDIA icon in systems tray.
Goto Custom colour settings.
Select 'restore hardware defaults'

I'm having the identical problem, but I think it's a codec issue and I wonder if anyone wants to tackle it.

I'm using vlc-0.8.6c on WinXP with an NVIDIA graphics card. All of a sudden, videos that used to play fine are now much darker. This first happened with some Divx files, so I downloaded Divx player and they played fine in there. However, this effect started propagating to Media Player Classic and Windows Media Player, who would sometimes play videos dark, sometimes not. I've now run into files that appear dark in Divx Player and VLC, or sometimes both, or sometimes neither. What's most mysterious about this, however, is that once a video appears dark in both VLC and Divx Player, reopening the file in VLC sometimes produces the correct bright video! This is, as far as I can tell, non-deterministic, so I just have to try all videos in VLC, then Divx, then VLC in hopes of getting a bright video...

Any ideas? I've uninstalled Divx Player and VLC (cleared preferences and cache) and then reinstalled VLC to no avail. This little ritual I have is workable, but I'd love to know what's going wrong...

i think i have the same problem, everything is really dark and all u can see are remnants of the picture and its like red or blue?

help me too plz! =(

Wow, I know this was last posted in quite a while ago, but I had(have) the same problem.

I've found that if I go into Nvidia Control panel, select "Ajust video color settings" from the side-links, and on "Standard" tab, check off "Apply these settings to all video technologies", it seems to fix the issue, if only temporarily.

As long as the brightness, contrass, hue, etc. are all what was originally set, this will override, most likely the codec's own, settings in vlc. (well it doesn't have to be "default settings" to override this, just that it's the recommended settings for a good picture) I'm not sure exactly if it is the codec or what, but I thought maybe someone will find this information more useful.

NOTE: It's odd, vlc defaults back to the original settings if you don't open Nvidia Control Panel when starting a new file in VLC.

IE, for every file you open in VLC, you have to open the nvidia control panel right after and then close it again right away if you don't actually want it open...just long enough for it to override the (/VLC's?) default settings.

reset your nVidia drivers preferences, especially overlay settings. It's in your video drivers, not related to VLC.