Color corruption in avi files
 

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!

First of all it should be good to post here what filter is actually used when playing the video files (load file->options->filters). Does it show ffdshow, XviD or DivX or it depending to the file. Also the error messages that you saw, what do they say ?
Try also to re-register quartz.dll using regsrv32.dll

Thank you very much for helping me!

OK, I loaded a file and went to options->filters->advanced (since that was the only enabled option) There, I click on the WM video decoder DMO, which is located at c:\windows\system32\quasf.dll
I tried it on another one and it said Xvid mpeg-4 video decoder and that one was located at: c:\windows\system32\xvid.ax (with quartz.dll 6.5.1.902 as the splitter)

Now then, they look fine in BSP now. I even tried turning the force rgb mode back off and the videos still play back correctly. It's only in all the other players, which don't seem to have a comparable setting, that they still look wrong.

I reregistered quartz.dll and it popped up a message saying, "DllRegisterServer in Quartz.dll succeeded" but it didn't seem to change anything.

In DFX+, there was no error message. When I pressed the start render, a little window titled "xvid" popped up, but it was totally blank (white) and it just sat there forever until I closed it and then pressed end task, at which time it disappeared along with dfx+

When playing the incomplete video, the error message was the standard windows error message:
BSPlayer has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience.
If you were in the middle....Please tell Microsoft about this problem...Debug, Send Error Report, Don't send.

Something I didn't do that time was to click in the error report. Now I did and in the error signature the AppName is bsplayer.exe and the ModName is xvidcore.dll

OK, it starts to make sense. Try to uninstall XviD 1.03 and install a newer build, maybe 1.1. I use it miself for a month now and have no problem sofar.

Thanks! :)
The problem persists so I guess it's time to reinstall Windows :( but I really appreciate all your help!

Did you update your Nvidia video drivers to version 77.72?
They come with wrong default values for brightness in video overlay.

Oh! I didn't know that!!
Yes, I had switched to 77.72 since the first day they came out. I can't understand why the problem hadn't happened before but I don't really care! All that matters is that you were right. The overlay curve was like a little squiggle at the top of the graph. Just setting it to advanced fixed the problem! I'm so HAPPY!!