Video calibration for displaying on TV

[nielm]

I am currently happy with my SageTV confiig, except for one quite large issue: I cannot get the on-screen image to have the correct color saturation / contrast / brightness -- everything seems to be both too dark and too intense (dark corners in thrillers become just black, and peoples faces become bright red!)

Part of the problem is that on my system (and I guess other people's systems are similar), there are at least 5 different places in which the display settings can be changed to affect the output:

• TV's own brightness/contrast
• Video card TvOut brightness/contrast
• Overlay settings (some video cards have extra filter settings in the control panel applet to adjust the video displayed using the overlay)
• MPEG2 decoder (some have internal video filters which can be adjusted)
• PVR-250 encoder ("video proc amp" settings)

With this many places to change the settings, coupled with the PVR-250's annoying habit of auto-readjusting the settings of the video proc amp, it is difficult to know where to start calibrating!

I have found some sites on the Web which contain images used to calibrate your monitor using the naked eye (see below), but how can I adjust my TV if the video card's TVout is badly set...

My current idea is:[list=1][*]Make an SVCD with the calibration images, and use these with my DVD player to calibrate my TV[*]Display images onto TV using PC, and calibrate the TVout settings[*]Either use graphedit to create a filter graph to display calibration images via overlay mixer filter, and calibrate this setting;
Or create a small AVI which just displays static calibration images, and view this in Sage while calibrating overlay filter[*]Create a small MPEG2 file which just displays static calibration images, and view this in Sage (or graphedit, or DVD player) while calibrating MPEG2 decoder[*]Play back the above SVCD from an external DVD player, through the PVR-250, while calibrating the PVR-250's video proc amp filter (see below for details)[/list=1]
Does anyone have any comments on this? Better suggestions?

And, does anyone know how to stop the PVR-250's "Video proc amp" from auto-adjusting all the time?

Links:

Sites containg calibration images / HOW-TO's
displaycalibration.com
GreatDV
JASC (PaintshopPro)
North Hills Radio Club
Gamma Calibration
Test images used by a test signal generator and on-line demo

Calibration DVD's
AVIA calibration DVD
VideoEssentials test DVD
Peter Finzel (german): Test DVD; How to make your own test SVCD: (german) (English via Google)

Sage Forums: How to calibrate PVR-250

[valnar]

No arguement on the difficulty getting everything calibrating. It does take time.

Thanks for the links.

Investing in AVIA or Video Essentials is certainly a good idea. They are useful for calibrating with external DVD players. Use that in conjunction with your display device (TV?), and you can calibrate your TV first through composite/S-video.

-Robert

[salsbst]

One trick that I use to keep settings set the way I want them is to remove my own permission to modify them (since most apps act on behalf of the logged in user). Use regedt32.exe and Deny full control to yourself on the key containing the values that you don't want modified.

***BE CAREFUL IF YOU DO THIS***

Removing your own permission to modify sections of the registry can render your operating system unbootable.

I haven't tried this trick on the video proc amp settings.