[MPlayer-users] mplayer very dark

[Corey Hickey]

Robert A. Knop Jr. wrote:
> [Automatic answer: RTFM (read DOCS, FAQ), also read DOCS/bugreports.html]
> I've made an animation out of frames rendered from Blender, and encoded them
> into an mjpeg with mencoder.
> 
> When I use xanim to play it back, it's slower and jerkier than mplayer, but
> the image looks very much like the individual images rendered out from
> Blender.
> 
> However, when I play it back with mplayer, the whole thing is much darker.
> I can improve the situation with a "-vop eq" flag, of course, but I'm
> curious: why does mplayer darken the video relative to the color values in
> the file?  I'm pretty sure it wasn't mencoder that did it, since xanim shows
> something very close to the "original" color values.
> 
> (Mind you, I'm very ignorant in general about computer video.  What I'm
> working on right now is putting together an animation to use in an astronomy
> class I'm teaching; it will be built with Blender, and encoded and played
> back with mplayer.  I've done some computer animation in the past in the
> sense of rendereing raytraced images and pasting them together into an Amiga
> animation format (ANIM5 or ANIM7), and I'm quite conversant with still
> computer images, but when it comes to actual video, MPEG formats,
> interaction with any real video signal, etc., I'm quite clueless.)
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> -Rob
> 

What vo driver are you using? Try messing around with -vo x11, -vo xv,
-vo sdl, etc. It might be that xine is using x11 video while mplayer is
xv, and your xv color is slightly off.

-Corey