About setting brightness

[Quietseb]

I would try changing the overlay settings in your video adapter driver:
- play a movie in overlay mode
- go to the display properties-->settings-->advanced dialog box; find the overlay tab o whatever of your video adapter driver and change the settings here.

However this will change the overlay brightness/contrast/gamma (...) settings for every application using overlay... [and in fact i'm not sure that's really different from what the HW color controls do]