Help with my sisters' monitor

[drfsupercenter]

Hey there, I picked out a nice TFT flat panel monitor for my sisters' computer, since the monitor that they had was huge and took up too much room. It works fine for them, once I adjusted the colors.
BUT, when watching DVDs, it looks absolutely horrible, all the colors are very dark and weird. I think it is due to the refresh rate. I have provided some pics to help you guys diagnose the problem, and a 22sec video that I took while playing the movie Ice Princess (this is my sisters' computer, so don't ask why I would watch a child's movie like that )

This is what the desktop looks like, as you can see here, the colors are all perfectly fine, and look good:

" target="_blank"> http://img334.imageshack.us/img334/1184/dsc003566uw.jpg

And, I took a picture of the Digital Video Forums to show how the colors look fine:


Now, for the movie - this looks horrendous (even worse!) on their monitor, they are right to complain to me :


I also have the video file (sorry, it's 28 MB, as my camera has pretty much no compression on the MPEG files - so it's like 1MB per second... Sorry!):

http://drfsupercenter.3lo.net/Videos/MOV00364.MPG

Greens for anyone who can help me solve this!

[chickeneater]

do you have ffdshow? you might be able to change some video output settings to increase brightness, contrast, gamma, whatever. Mess around and test stuff, just try not to completely break it

[drfsupercenter]

Well, when I tried FFDShow, it made WMP not show any video whatsoever (on my computer that is), so I am a little nervous to try it. It might have to do with the refresh rate, I DO remember the computer store associate telling me that the refresh rate was not good for hardcore gamers... but my sisters are not gamers so I ignored it. Is this the problem?

[Chewy]

what's the video card and drivers?

[drfsupercenter]

No idea... it originally had Windows ME and I upgraded the memory, and the OS to Windows XP. We bought it 6 years ago, so it has a small video card, I think nVidia, but I know that XP just found them automatically. It is definately the monitor, because the DVDs looked perfect on their old CFC monitor, just this flat panel looks bad. Would a low refresh rate cause this? I tried both powerdvd and WMP.

[anonymez]

I DO remember the computer store associate telling me that the refresh rate was not good for hardcore gamers

he means the response time is high-- not good for games and video-- you may see ghosting effects during high motion, depending how high the value is and type of panel.

BUT, when watching DVDs, it looks absolutely horrible

does this happen ONLY with dvd's?, get latest graphics card drivers & directx.

then reset monitor to factory defaults

try using VLC to play-- will eliminate codec issues

[drfsupercenter]

Oh, didn't know that about the refresh rates. And, yes the problem is only with DVDs. I tried PowerDVD and WMP. As you can see from the screen shot, the PowerDVD control panel looks fine, just the movie looks bad.

I will try VLC and see what happens. All I changed from factory defaults were the brightness and contrast to make the monitor brighter.