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Tip: setting brightness for video overlay on graphics cards

If you find that video -- whether played from a DVD or a
file -- is consistently too bright or too dark on your PC,
you may benefit from my experience.

For the several years I've had my current PC, I've contended
with nearly all video being way too dark, especially night
scenes, so I would temporarily increase the brightness by
using the monitor's built-in controls, since the few
brightness presets in PowerDVD are not sufficient to fully
compensate. (For regular computer use, I keep the monitor's
brightness set at center-range.) VLC's facility for
controlling brightness and contrast was one of the main
reasons I switched several months ago. However, it's still
been a nuisance to have to re-enable "Image adjust" and
reset the brightness and contrast every time I start VLC,
since it doesn't remember these settings when I exit.

Yesterday (Oct. 1), in a thread about VLC not saving
brightness settings, I saw the statement that the problem
lies with the user's graphics card. This got me thinking
about the graphics adapter in my PC, the Intel 82865G
Graphics Controller chip set. The software for configuring
it is labeled "Intel Extreme Graphics 2". On Windows XP, I
can get to it through the Control Panel or by right-clicking
on the desktop and picking "Graphics Options ..." from the
pop-up menu.

This graphics controller program has a Video Overlay button,
which opens the Overlay Settings dialog. There, I discovered
that the default setting for brightness is 7 on a scale of
0 - 100. No wonder video looked so dark! A little experimenting
indicates 26 is satisfactory as a general setting, based on the
several videos I tried, such as an old black and white horror
movie and a slide show I made of color, digital photographs.

So far, this change has not affected the regular display for
normal, non-overlay, computer use. So it appears I no longer
have to adjust the brightness everytime I watch video (at
least once a day).

That was my post

Any idea how this is done in Nvidia?

Adjust video color settings from NVIDIA control panel.

Tip: setting brightness for video overlay on graphics cards
If you find that video -- whether played from a DVD or a
file -- is consistently too bright or too dark on your PC,
you may benefit from my experience.
On Windows XP, I can get to it through the Control Panel or by right-clicking
on the desktop and picking "Graphics Options ..." from the
pop-up menu.
This graphics controller program has a Video Overlay button,
which opens the Overlay Settings dialog. There, I discovered
that the default setting for brightness is 7 on a scale of
0 - 100. No wonder video looked so dark! .

Wow, you just solved one of my longest running PC issues! Thankyou!
Seems I'll be able to play a lot more of my games too now.

Wow, you just solved one of my longest running PC issues! Thank you!
Seems I'll be able to play a lot more of my games too now.

My pleasure. I figured there'd be other folks with the same problem
who could use the tip.

I once converted a monitor calibration image file (a .gif i found in google) to video (.avi) using avidemux, and used that to calibrate the overlay settings, as you would normally use just the image to calibrate the normal monitor settings. Still not perfect, but it looks pretty good, everything considered.

using these methods I have now managed to get my colour, saturation, gamma & contrast all spot on.
no more fiddling with VLC's advanced controls
every video looks fine 1st time with no intervention now.
you heroes!