goPostal wrote:

Heh, I understand. This is more a systemic thing. The poor playback is
across several different players (on the same box though). That made me
think codec so I cleaned my codecs out and reinstalled everything. I reset
the defaults in all my gamma/display settings in the NV control panel. Still
haven't fixed it. I DL'ed the new beta driver from NVidia and my next step
is to update them.

I was more concerned that there was a known problem with the newer drivers.
I found a couple of vague forum references to gamma problems on the last
couple released so I thought it might be a common post here. I appreciate
the response too!

Have you tried and 3rd party codec suites? Like the K-Lite video suites?
they are pretty excellent all around, and not wanting to just be all
blah-blah-blah, fix it yourself, I went ahead and went to the site:

http://www.k-litemegacodecpack.com/

Where I found this paragraph of topical interest:

nVidia drivers
Thursday - September 28 (2006)

We have seen several reports and questions all over the Internet from
people that are having display problems. Symptoms include very dark
video playback. This problem is not caused by codecs. It is caused by
bad nVidia drivers, which configure themselves incorrectly.

If you are experiencing such issues, here are some tips to solve your
problems:

*
Go to your graphics card control panel. Reset all settings to
their default values. Important settings are Brightness, Contrast,
Saturation and Gamma. You can access the control panel via: Start
Settings Control Panel Display Settings Advanced.
*
Go to your graphics card control panel. Select the "Color
Correction" page. Select "All" in the dropdown box called "Apply color
changes to:". Then click on the button called "Restore Defaults".
*
Go to your graphics card control panel. Open the "video and
television" options. (You need to be in the advanced view). Select
"adjust video colour settings", then select "correction". Hit "do not
use colour temperature correction".
*
If resetting the settings does not help, then find an older
version of the drivers (for example v84.21). Uninstall your current
drivers, reboot, and install the older ones.

If you have got additional or more specific solutions, please post them
at the forum.

Your intuition was right, it's the forceware drivers, not the codecs. I
have had first hand experience with buggy gamma in forceware drivers,
but only in OpenGL applications. Sometimes when the app terminates, the
gamma boost that the app was using, is carried over to the desktop.
Icky, only resolved by a reset. HTH!