John Liu .NET

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Recording Playback Woes with Windows Media Player

Alt Title: Windows Media Player playback too Bright

Sometime last week I recorded an online session for the upcoming SPBiz Conference.
I did this using Camtasia, and was quite happy with the quality.

I then exported this to MP4 file, and there's where I started banging my head.

See how the colours are quite messed up.  Everything has gone extremely bright and you lost all the details on the PhantomJS logo.  My dev.office.com T-Shirt beams like a cyan-highlighter pen.

Thinking I screwed up with the export, I then proceed to spend the evening exporting and re-exporting with different options.  I also tweaked Camtasia to apply a slight blue filter to the whole slide, to try to give the presentation a more differentiating shade.

Near the end of the night, I decided I had a somewhat (not as crap) copy of the video, and upload it to OneDrive.

What was very interesting, is that the video played back from the browser fine - with no colour distortion.

I double checked by opening the MP4 in VLC player, and that looks fine too.

So it turns out my struggles were fairly self-inflicted.  It was Windows Media Player deciding to just be really bright! 

I did around later to get to the bottom of this.  Turns out there's some Driver level settings I needed to reset.

I flipped my Input Range from "Driver Settings" back to Application Settings and that seems to reset the whole thing.  The Preview on the right also looked a lot better.  After I applied this change in the Graphics Control Panel - my Windows Media Player also looks fine now.