Very strange player problem

[Steven Fokkinga]

Hi all. I've been experiencing a very strange problem after editing my first short: after I had exported it from premiere and played it back with media player, it looked a bit darker than it should be. It also had a sort of more saturated look.

Now the strange thing is, if I open up another media player and put the exact same file into this, it plays back the file as it was intented, so less dark and less over-saturated. Note that this effect is not extremely obvious, that's why I didn't really notice until I shot some low-light scenes. With the 'first' media player I really couldn't see much and with the second it was ok.

Now the reason why I put this thread here and not in the sony camera-section (I have a vx1000) or the premiere section is because I discovered that it does this to all my video files, so also the movies I have on my HDD give this effect. It isn't too apparant if you just put on one screen, but with the comparison to the second MP the difference is clearly visible.

The big problem with this is that this way I'm not sure what my final product will look like, which is off course unaccaptable. Mind that I have this problem with all formats (avi and mpg, etc.) and with all players (MP classic, MP9, VLC-player, etc.), so I'm thinking of a hardware problem.

Does any of this make sense to anyone?

Steven

[Rob Lohman]

Are you saying if you open TWICE the SAME Windows Media Player
the second one plays the file differently?

If so that sounds really weird and I'd say it is either a corrupt
installation or a driver issue:

1. what operating system are you running?

2. which version of WMP are you running?

3. which graphics card do you have?

4. are you running the latest drivers for this graphics card?

[Steven Fokkinga]

<<<-- Originally posted by Rob Lohman : Are you saying if you open TWICE the SAME Windows Media Player
the second one plays the file differently? -->>>

Yes, that's exactly my problem, weird as it may sound.

1. Windows XP SP2

2. WMP 9.00.00.3250 -- but I don't think it's important, since have this with any player (VL, MP classic, power-DVD, etc.)

3. Leadtek Nvidia TI4400

4. Not sure, will check it (damn that leadtek site with 1 kb/s download!)

Hope this helps?

Steven

[Rob Lohman]

I agree with you that I doubt WMP is the issue. Your system
seems up to date indeed. Sounds like a driver issue/bug to me!

[Sean McHenry]

It may be due to the way your video card is handeling multiple video overlays. An overlay is quite a bit like a video "key". Some keys are good and clean, some aren't. Trying to open more than one overlay generating program, like two incidents of Media Player, might not be good on your system.

You might want to try a few things for which I will take NO credit or blame for...Use Windows Media Players built in updater and make sure you have the latest version or the beta of ver. 10. Also, get the latest video drivers and the latest version of DirectX. Do the DirectX update first I think, then the video drivers.

See what that does for you. Again, if you do this be aware that not all upgrades are a good thing and I take no responsibilities if it works - or smokes your machine or files. There is actually a very slim chance anything bad will happen.

Sean McHenry