[doncaruana]

For years, my original Xbox 1 has been running xbmc and I love the gamma setting on it. Looking to replace it with a pc and testing with the windows version. I notice that on my machine, there is no gamma setting. I have gamma controls capability for the video card in my machine (Nvidia GEForce 7600 GT), but only brightness and contrast on XBMC.

I apologize for the ignorance (I did search first), but is there something I'm missing here? Is there a way to enable gamma as a video adjustment on the PC version or is this some functionality that has been deprecated?

[doncaruana]

Anyone?

[jhsrennie]

There's always a trade off between what should be done by XBMC and what should be done by the host OS. On an XBox the distinction between the app XBMC and the OS is a bit blurred, but on Windows it's obviously far clearer. Presumably XBMC provides brightness and contrast controls because you do get occasional rogue videos that need the brightness and contrast tweaking.

Anyhow, just adjust the gamma using the Windows settings.

JR

[doncaruana]

Thanks for the reply - that makes some (unfortunate) sense. I was hoping to be able to just use xbmc as a complete stand alone htpc, which is all my original xbox is now. But sometimes some of the videos are a little dark and gamma correction is the best adjustment (vs brightness and contrast). So it's a per instance thing, not a system thing that I was looking for.

Maybe I'll go back and play with the xbox settings a bit and see if I can get what I need out of brightness and contrast instead.

thanks!

[wsippel]

There's always a trade off between what should be done by XBMC and what should be done by the host OS. On an XBox the distinction between the app XBMC and the OS is a bit blurred, but on Windows it's obviously far clearer. Presumably XBMC provides brightness and contrast controls because you do get occasional rogue videos that need the brightness and contrast tweaking.

Anyhow, just adjust the gamma using the Windows settings.

JR

What about rogue videos with weird gamma then? Those aren't exactly uncommon - pretty much every h264 file encoded with either Quicktime or Adobe AFX looks wrong in XBMC. Having to change the OS gamma settings to fix individual videos doesn't strike me as a very elegant solution.

[YodaEXE]

What about rogue videos with weird gamma then? Those aren't exactly uncommon - pretty much every h264 file encoded with either Quicktime or Adobe AFX looks wrong in XBMC. Having to change the OS gamma settings to fix individual videos doesn't strike me as a very elegant solution.

I can't say I've ever had that problem. You sure it's not something with your setup?

[wsippel]

I can't say I've ever had that problem. You sure it's not something with your setup?

No, it's actually a common problem, sadly. h264 files encoded with Quicktime appear too bright, files encoded with AFX appear too dark. It's not brightness, though - it's gamma. From what I understand, this also affects movies encoded with iMovie and even Final Cut Pro, as those applications use the Quicktime framework as well. Just google "quicktime gamma shift".

Quicktime itself displays the videos just fine, increasing gamma by 0.2 in MPlayerX also does the trick. In XBMC, I have to fool around with brightness and contrast, but that doesn't really fix the problem.