Quote:
Originally Posted by Tulli /forum/post/15477522
Yes, but it's really not that clear that it's because of a "bug" in the drivers. For instance, if I set PDVD8 to use EVR I get consistent blacks like any other video application (VMC, VMP, ZP), except of course TMT and WinDVD9. This proves to me that it's the HD apps through their way of implementing a protected video path that seem to ignore the drivers setting and expand anyway.
I've tested this with discrete ATI (3850) and Nvidia (9800gtx, 9600gt) with latest drivers on Vista x32 and x64.
This is a bug, because everything else works exactly as expected.
Which exact video cards are you using, you have to have a native HDMI port on the card, not a dongle.
ATI always expands HD video levels to the desktop and their "pixel format" option changes the desktop levels, with the useBTC601 reg entry DVD and BD are consistent.
With nvidia there are a number of permutations, but I'll lump them into not bugged and bugged.
Not bugged:
Desktop black is at 0, the video level in the control panel effects both SD and HD together. With the video level at limited you pass BTB and WTW data.
Bugged:
Desktop is at 16 (only via native HDMI out w/ Vista), and because the desktop is at 16, now you need to set the video level to expanded which clips BTB and WTW data, but this will get your black level consistent with other CE devices (and with limited in all the not bugged scenarios). But protected path does this absolutely instead of releation to the desktop. It's very easy to verify that it still does respect the driver setting, because if you set it to limited then the black level comes up a notch and BD playback will now match other CE devices, Black will match black on the desktop, but DVD now has an elevated black compared to the desktop.
The way you know this has to be a bug, is that you can do something you've probably never seen before BTB for windows. if you playback a calibration pattern like the one off the AVS disc and resize the playback window for powerDVD or TMT to non 16x9 so you get windows generated black bars, the content playing back is darker than the desktop black (you may need to turn the display brightness up to see this).
This is 100% repeatable, I've seen it over multiple installations it is absolutely a bug.
As a programmer myself I can visualize exactly where this probably is in their code an what it takes to fix (probably like 3 lines of code).