Videos playback darker in LE than in Roku Emby app on same TV

mooncaptain · May 10, 2021 at 1:53 AM

I am trying to get video playback brighter.

I'm running LE on an RIP4b into an HD TV over HDMI. Hooked up to the same TV I have a ROKU running Emby player. Playing the same video in both LE and Roku Emby the Roku playback is much brighter (but really what I would consider normal) especially problematic are night scenes where a lot of contrast and detail is lost.

I have messed around with the brightness settings on the TV that helps some but then the daylight scenes start to bleach out some.

In LE I have turned MMAL on and off - no difference.

Don't know any other settings to try.

I also re encoded the h265 files to h264 to see if that made a difference . It didn't.

Are there settings I can put into settings files that can help with this problem?

**Da Flex** · May 10, 2021 at 4:13 AM Official Post

Yes, this is a known pheno-menon (censored word ) on all RPi's. There is no brightness setting, but you can increase the color space (mode "RGB full") by changing hdmi_pixel_encoding. This can affect brightness.

Not sure which LE version you use, so this setting belongs to config.txt (older versions) or cmdline.txt (newer versions).

mooncaptain · May 10, 2021 at 12:52 PM

Quote

Not sure which LE version you use, so this setting belongs to config.txt (older versions) or cmdline.txt (newer versions).

OK - I updated my signature to include LE 9.2.6 and Kodi 18.9 - I haven't upgraded because the Emby add-on hasn't been released yet - just Beta last I looked.

I looked in /flash and found a copy of both config.txt and cmdline.txt - since I've got to go to work instead of hacking around in both files I'll just ask - which one should I edit?

**Da Flex** · May 10, 2021 at 9:30 PM Official Post

On LE 9.x add hdmi_pixel_encoding=2 to config.txt. On LE 10+, this setting belongs to cmdline.txt (I still have to figure out the syntax for this).

**Da Flex** · May 10, 2021 at 10:21 PM Official Post

PS: TV's often have a "picture mode" setting. Play around with those modes (set to "dynamic" or "auto").

mooncaptain · May 11, 2021 at 12:49 PM

The config.txt adjustment helped a small bit. However, I finally figured out the TV adjustments that helped to the point where the images in almost all cases looks good. The picture modes on this old Vizio don't include an "auto" but there are settings like Vivid, Standard, etc. including Calibrated so I picked Vivid and tweaked the brightness and contrast to tone it down a bit.

Thanks for the help