[Soulbind]

Hmm, truth to be told don't know where to put this one , so i guess the Hardware forum should do. It's not related to Kodi strictly, but it involves video playback in Kodi alongside MPC-HC, and this time, computer monitors not HDTVs.

Anyway, let me start. A week ago i decided to upgrade my old Acer 1680x1050 22 inch monitors on my workstation, to something that isn't from the stone-age. They were VGA and used a TN panel, so yeah, old and rusty. Bought a couple of new 23inch 1080p Acer ones, with HDMI and a proper IPS panel on them. Ok, so now the "fun" part comes.

I hooked up one of them to the HDMI ouput of my workstation, and left the old one on the VGA output. I noticed while watching a movie that the colors were kinda washed out, the blacks especially. Tried different settings in the OSD, nothing fixed it. Since washed out blacks is a symptom of incorrect color levels, i went to the Intel Control Panel and searched for something regarding that. Found an option to enable YCbCr instead of RGB, which kinda fixed the problem, but since these are computer monitors and not HDTVs, Full Range 0-255 RGB is what they should be working with.

So i searched the internet, and found some posts on a forum regarding this. Apparently the Intel HD graphics drivers assume that some 1080p monitors are TVs, not monitors, and output Limited RGB 16-235, which explains the washed out colors. And looking in my Intel Graphics Control Panel, my display is listed as an "Digital Television" , not as a computer monitor (my VGA one is listed as a Monitor), which kinda confirms my theory.
Anyway, a fix that does work is to create a custom resolution with a CVT-RB timing, apparently that tricks the drivers into outputting Full Range RGB, and fixes my issue. And it works fine.

Now my question is, is there any toggle or setting that could force Full Range RGB in the Intel CP, besides this workaround? Or has anybody had issues like this before, and what were your solutions?

[Soli]

Yeah, just use madlevelstweaker. (And reboot afterwards). Easiest solution. Some intel gpus are able to switch between full/limited rgb in cp, but most are not.

[JDEaston]

Have you checked to see if you can change quantization? If IntelHD recognizes it as a tv monitor instead of a pc monitor it will give you the option to change quantization, if you change it to deep it should give you proper blacks and colors.

[Soulbind]

Yeah, just use madlevelstweaker. (And reboot afterwards). Easiest solution. Some intel gpus are able to switch between full/limited rgb in cp, but most are not.

Thanks, works like a charm, same result as the custom resolution trick. Yeah, that's the setting i was searching for, found where it's supposed to be after some Googling around, it's missing in my case ( Intel Core i5 2500K / HD3000) so i'm out of luck apparently.

[Soulbind]

Have you checked to see if you can change quantization? If IntelHD recognizes it as a tv monitor instead of a pc monitor it will give you the option to change quantization, if you change it to deep it should give you proper blacks and colors.

Yeah, that was the setting i was hoping someone would tell where it's located, but meanwhile i found out off Google, it's in Intel CP -> Display -> Monitor/TV Settings. But i don't have it there, not all Intel GPU drivers have it apparently. So i'm probably stuck with the custom resolution hack or the madvrlevels tweaker.