How to make dark scenes/video blend better and look natural?

[sunsurfer]

Hi, I love VLC but I'm a tech novice and all the advanced controls confuse me. Everything works perfect for me for the most part, but I've always had a problem with dark scenes on VLC. Regular and even semi-dark scenes are fine, but once it goes too dark, the image becomes blocky and square-like, giving it a sort of fuzzy unnatural digital cartoony look. For instance, if I'm watching a movie on DVD and there's a black shadow, usually the blacks blend and look natural, but on VLC the shadow may be separated by tones of black and each tone completely separate from the other rather than blended, and the lines between them won't even be curving but rather small straight lines in boxes as if the image were made up of many small but visible boxes and each box can only be one or the other shade of black. It can be really distracting, especially if an important scene is dark or in a movie with many dark scenes.

I thought maybe there's some simple way to fix this in VLC with all the various controls but I have no idea how or even what to search for on google or here to find the solution. Thanks for any help!

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

You could try to use the denoising filter and the gradient one.

[sunsurfer]

Those don't work, at least as far as I can tell. I have no idea what they're supposed to do or how I'm meant to change them, but I tried jiggling with both of them in different ways and it didn't fix the problem.

Doesn't this same problem happen to everybody? It happens to me on every video that has dark scenes. Just like old VHS videos might look "grainy" or "spotty" or whatever, it seems like playing anything on VLC makes any dark scenes look "digital" or sort of "cartoony" because somehow it won't process such dark shades together well enough. I've reset all my settings too to make sure it's nothing I'd accidentally changed, so this is at normal settings, so it seems like this should happen to everybody using VLC?

ETA - I've thought of one thing that might be unique to me. I use VLC on a Mac, which I don't think is the reason this is happening since lots of people use VLC with Macs, but what I do is, instead of using a computer monitor, I connect the Mac to an HDTV using an HDMI cord, and have for a few years. It works perfectly on everything, screen looks great and everything, so no problems at all, but maybe this has something to do with the dark images not looking proper on VLC? Maybe there's some setting in VLC that would help this, if this is indeed the problem?