Color corruption in avi files

[lironmiron]

Hi!

I've been using bsp without problems for four months. Since yesterday, all my avi files play horribly. They show no contrast, like a very dark picture with gamma way up and the colors are all wrong; they're spilled and like the negative of the color they should be or just the wrong one and blocky artifacts.

Before continuing, the usual info: amdA64 3200+, winXP sp1, 6800GT with forceware 77.72 (1280*960*32), bsp 1.22 build 817.

I did two things regarding video yesterday that I think could have caused the problem. One was selecting xvid as the codec of a sequence I saved from DFX+, because I was curious to try it. That made a blank xvid mini-window appear and it froze the application, which I had to kill. I retried twice with identical results.

The other was playing an incomplete avi file from a rescued drive in bsp. That was the first file I saw with the incorrect color but I thought it was because it was corrupt. After a few seconds, windows popped up an error and forced bsp to close. Being as thick-headed as I am, I also retired this two more times.

After that, I noticed that all avi files played with the same ugly colors! I don't know which of the two error-producing things I did was the one that caused it.

My first thought was that I had corrupted all the hard drive, so I tried to play some avis stored on CD and they played just as bad.

After a few reboots, I tried using other video players (Windows media player 9 and Creative mediasource player) and they played the files just as uglyly.

The .mov files, playing in quicktime, looked just fine. No color problems at all. No problems with application/browser colors or with game colors (2D or otherwise). Even compositing apps like DFX+ and virtualdub, that load avi files visually, don't present the problem within their interface.

Then I uninstalled xvid, redownloaded and reinstalled the 1.0.3 build, but that didn't help. Then, I downloaded the Microsoft player 9 codec pack and reinstalled that. Since it didn't help one bit, I even downloaded and tried divx. Although the little divx logo appeared, indicating that it was being used, it looked just as bad.

So I took a p screenshot from bsp to show what the problem looked like, but the screenshot looked fine. So I examined the bsp settings and when I activated "force rgb mode" the colors got fixed.

Yet, the problem is not really solved, since all other players still show the wrong colors. So I wondered if anyone knew what kind of problems "force rgb mode" fixed, to see if it could hint as to what the problem might be.

Thank you!