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!

[adicoto]

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

[lironmiron]

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

[adicoto]

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.

[lironmiron]

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

[sr.metalsombrero]

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

[lironmiron]

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!!