[lmyllari]

Using full range video output from Ubuntu, monitor set to limited range RGB and playing video with mplayer2, everything seems to be in order. Levels are correct, BtB and WtW are there, no banding in greyscale ramp. No oddities in resolution tests either, although I haven't looked for chroma issues yet. I also checked static RGB images with same results.

My command line:
~/src/mplayer2-build/mplayer/mplayer --colormatrix-output-range=limited -vo gl -fs

I will next try the VA-API enabled mplayer (if I can make it build) to verify that hw decoding works properly. Maybe the issues are with XBMC YUV-RGB converter.

See: http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid...pid1418235
Quote: XBMCbuntu has brightness and contrast because it does software decoding.

I think you missed the point. I too have a calibrated video monitor and want accurate greyscale with no banding (untouched 16-235 luminance) - not something "almost right" by messing with contrast, brightness and gamma (and possibly papering over the errors with dithering).

What my testing above shows that the Haswell NUC hardware and drivers should be capable of that.

I did some quick testing with mplayer-vaapi and didn't see any obvious errors (and I would be surprised if the decoding wasn't bit exact). It is pretty unstable though - good work XBMC devs making the decoding work much better