[MPlayer-users] Strange video where playback is too dark

[Firon Draak]

I have some videos where they play back much too dark, and I know they
shouldn't be that dark. It's an MPEG-1 video. The thing is, the encoding app
that made it reduces the color depth to 15 bits (sometimes 18 or 21) before
padding it back to 24 and passing it to Mencoder for MPEG-1 encoding for
somewhat faster decoding on the target device (a Nintendo DS, which has a
15-bit display). However, I believe it's adding the padding in the wrong
location. Basically, if the original color was 10101010, and it's encoding
to say RGB15, it makes that 10101, but when it pads it, it ends up as
00010101 instead of 10101000.

When the video is played back in mplayer, it comes out as way too dark. The
playback application on the DS plays it back fine.

I'm not exactly sure if it's Mencoder or the application doing it. The app
passes the video as raw BGR24 to Mencoder (rgb2bgr=swap doesn't fix it,
before someone mentions it), so I think it's the app.

In any case, is there any way to work around this problem on playback with
mplayer without re-encoding the videos? I can post a sample of one of the
videos, if someone wants to examine it, or something, since I could be wrong
about why it's too dark.

Thanks in advance.