After attempting to play back some MPEG and DivX videos, I was getting strange colors in every program I was using, including VLC, Windows Media Player and mplayer. Even tweaking the gamma, constrast, hue, brightness and every other setting I could find, the video still looked washed out and dark. The only thing affected was video playback. The desktop, web browsing and games all looked fine.
Finally, I figured out that in the NVidia control panel, there are seperate settings for video playback. Somehow they had all been changed to bizzare values. All it took was to return them to the default to fix the problem. Very strange, as I know I didn’t touch any of these values and I had just reinstalled this system from scratch. Anyway, hope this helps someone Googling this problem as I wasn’t able to find any useful information.
August 16th, 2006 at 4:14 pm
thanks for the solution, it was driving me crazy.
November 25th, 2006 at 8:35 am
Thanks, it did help me while googling
December 28th, 2006 at 8:10 am
So glad I found this - fixed the problem I’ve been having since I installed a new 7600GS a few days ago.
Now videos don’t have the washed-out, dark look.
Thanks
January 5th, 2007 at 10:11 pm
Thanks alot! I couldn’t figure out what I did wrong and was starting to rollback all my windows media thing…
For people that need help… it should be in desktop properties > Setting > Advanced > overlay
January 8th, 2007 at 9:31 pm
holy crap thank you this was driving me insane…why would nvidia default to such a wacked out setting?!
February 2nd, 2007 at 6:28 pm
Thank you a lot! I had to format my PC, and the last driver for NVIDIA FX 5200 in XFX website comes with that problem. When googling for “nvidia strange colors”, this post appears at the head of the list.
BTW, too bad the driver comes with such a dumb error…
March 5th, 2007 at 1:59 am
Thx alot for the help, was really nice of you to make this article the problem was driving me nuts, and I was happy to find a quick and easy solution to the problem.
March 5th, 2007 at 6:00 pm
Your the man. I was going insane trying to figure it out.
Its under Video Overlay. I just set it to default. Thanks again bro.
March 10th, 2007 at 9:22 am
Thanks a lot, really helped
March 12th, 2007 at 12:19 am
Totally helped.
May 7th, 2007 at 4:10 pm
yep….thanks alot..solved a problem i`ve had for ages…
May 17th, 2007 at 5:43 pm
Thanks! That really helped, couldn’t NVIDIA fix this? How unprofessionnal…
June 29th, 2007 at 6:38 am
The porblem is not fixed on Vista 32 because they removed the Color Temperature from Control Panel so the video playback is still red for me. Anyone having the same issue (8600 GTS, Forceware 158.24)
July 11th, 2007 at 10:10 pm
u rock, thanks soo much, all my vids were looking horrible, everything is perfect now
August 8th, 2007 at 9:54 am
So I’ve seen a similar problem, but I’m not sure it is fixed in the control panel.
Basically if I play a full screen game (all 3d these days), if I then try to play a video it’ll be super dark with only the brightest of red/orange showing through. It’ll stay that way until reboot. I thought perhaps it was drivers, nope, or perhaps a game that didn’t set the pallette back, but several games do this (I don’t mean there are some that don’t, I mean that I’ve tried several and all do the same)
Any ideas?
August 16th, 2007 at 7:09 am
I got exactly the same problem, I hate it allways having to restart my pc for just wanting to watch a video…
I tried to fix it with the overlay thing, but most of the times it has no effect (depends if I have played a game or not). I allready tried several things (like downloading too many drivers) but I cant fix this, if someone finds a solution post here ;).
August 30th, 2007 at 9:31 pm
I’ve got the same problem described in response #15 and I’ve found the only solution for me (I have a 6800GT with latest farceware drivers) is to right click desktop - settings - advanced - then simply click the nvidia tab. Everything goes back to normal then until I reboot and play another game. Very strange, I’m thinking it has to do with directshow not playing nice with ffdshow’s latest build. I’m gonna check the overlay settings since some of you reported it helped. for those of you it doesn’t, just try my trick… it might work.
October 8th, 2007 at 1:12 pm
…also try turning off all graphics card acceleration…click apply….then turn it on again. worked for me! cheers
October 14th, 2007 at 7:09 pm
nice of you to think of others
October 19th, 2007 at 10:57 pm
Thanks, it just changed all of the sudden and could not figure out what was going on. It was driving me nuts and it was great to find this before I started really messing around with the drivers etc.
November 2nd, 2007 at 1:00 am
I have no idea why the setting for videos changed suddenly, but thanks for the Googleness!
November 3rd, 2007 at 11:38 am
Thanks a lot, this saved me a lot time!
April 16th, 2008 at 11:06 am
I found this while googling. My problem was that the email attachments with videos would bring out strange colors, but regular videos already stored on the computer would work ok.
So, the basic idea is to solve the “overlay” problem. In Windows Media Player, Tools > Options > Performance > Advanced > Uncheck “Use video mixing render” and “use overlays”. That should do it.
October 22nd, 2008 at 7:00 am
Thank you so much!
That’s a huge relief.
It was driving me mad as well.