Yv12 on Vista = gray instead of black

Run Vista's "Windows Media Center" setup wizard. I noticed the similar 'brighter blacks', now everything is fine. I had to reduce the brightness on my monitor. The windows media center wizard will loop a movie with a guy in a black suit and a black 'x' in the background, run it and calibrate your controls.

My point is that all broadcasters use 16-235 levels. All DVD titles (with the exception of badly mastered ones - I think only a handful) and HD-DVD/Bluray titles use 16-235 levels. Make sense? (It seems a lot of doom9 re-encoders like to expand 16-235 to 0-255 - so they must have their displays calibrated for PC levels - that's too bad for those of us who use real TVs to watch them!) How it displays on your screen depends on your calibration. If your display can't achieve black at 16 (instead of very dark grey) then you need to fix that - lots of good advice here! CRTs have no trouble with calibrating black levels. Digital displays designed for home theater generally don't have any problems with this either. It doesn't help that desktop computers are designed for PC levels - where true black is at 0 and not 16. When you watch video on a PC blacks won't look right. But it is easy to work around it without needing to recalibrate the display - just lower VMR9 brightness (and increase VMR9 contrast if you want to do the expansion), or use the player's brightness control. Easy! No need to switch profiles on your display. Now, I have a front projector - I don't need to recalibrate to watch video on it. :) I use the VMR9 procamp method for my LCD monitor. BTW, how did you take that screenshot for the Gorillaz DVD source? It is possible that the DVD player did the level expansion, which would crush your blacks. Now, the re-encode to x264 looks correct - I'd guess that AVISynth did NOT do a level expansion and everything is as it should be - on a TV that is set up properly for video levels. :) Another BTW: Supposedly Vista was supposed to "fix" the PC levels versus video levels thing. A year ago I read that Microsoft was going to make everything go into video levels - this would mean that your desktop would be remapped from 0-255 to 16-235 levels - but obviously this isn't the case because then everyone (including me!) would bitch. :)

I used MPC to take screenshot from gorillaz

@ Rectal Prolapse: I once tried to software-calibrate VMR9 (using brightness, contrast and saturation switches from ffdshow) and, believe me or not, the end-effect was worse than e.g. HQ RGB32. I think it often depends on what we are used to. ;) Btw. Using hardware acceleration for MPEG-2 decoding gave me identical results as RGB32 (Radeon 9800 PRO @ XT). I'm watching everything on PC, so I've got a different approach than you. And since the OSD on my precious Iiyama (love its colours) is broken I can only howl at the moon atm. :D cheers, HDBR77

I think the least expensive solution CPU-wise (still not sure about quality) would be using ffdshow's AviSynth module with ColorYUV("TV->PC"). Conversion to RGB will definitely take more CPU, but will also solve chroma upsampling problems which result in blocky/pixelated pure colors (such as red). This may not be needed for ATI, though.

I'll have to try that out - or I could just use RGB32. Well, except for HD-DVDs. Oops. :(