[Matt Winter]

Can anyone PLEASE help me?
I’ve just replaced my CRT monitor, which displayed DVD’s (via PowerDVD) without any hassles, for a Samsung TFT LCD monitor. After linking up the monitor and installing the driver, a quick check showed DVD’s able to play 100%. I later installed two ‘color manipulation’ software packages (Natural Color & Magic Tune Pro) that Samsung said would improve color control better than the monitor’s ‘on-board’ controls. I ‘played around’ with these packages, & then let auto tune do the job to correct funny colors. I now found the color in DVD’s to be absolutely way out yellow-green. I uninstalled the two software programs, but no change. I then found the “reset” feature on the monitor and restored factory settings – DVD’s back to normal. I then re-installed Magic Tune and checked the colors & once again DVD colors were fine.

After a couple of days I tried a DVD and colors were wonky again. I uninstalled Magic Tune and tried the “Reset” feature, to no avail. I discovered some ‘color profile’ files that had been stored by Natural Color (& never uninstalled!) and deleted them – it still didn’t help. I tried a DVD via WMP 11, but colors are the same as with PowerDVD so the problem can’t be with PowedDVD. In ‘Display settings/color Management, I tested the available ‘Color profiles’, but this didn’t help either

DVD color (via PowerDVD) is fine on my laptop (OS Windows XP Professional), and if I connect the LCD monitor to my laptop as an external monitor, colors are also fine. What bugs me is that everything worked before so I don’t think the problem is with the monitor, but with some setting that is “stuck” in the memory/registry or something like that of my desktop PC (OS Windows XP Home – Adapter type = S3 Graphics ProSavageDDR).

Display settings = 1280 x 1024 pixels (Samsung default) / Color quality :Highest (32 bit)
Advanced settings give access to the following:
·General – DPI setting (Normal size [96 DPI]
·Adapter Type (Info – S3 ProSavageDDR )
·Monitor type (info – SyncMaster 943N/943NX) = 60 Hertz screen refresh rate (Samsung default)
·Color Management ( Add/remove colour profiles)
·S3Display = Dispay Device CRT?? – no settings for device
·S3Info Plus = Info - System config/S3 Driver/DirectX (9.0b)
·S3Overlay = Message -‘Cannot adjust color because either a video file is not open or the video is not in YUV format. RGB data is not supported by this utility.- details (no Video/No YUV data). After closing message screen via OK, a ‘S3 Graphics Screen Goodies’ feature opens where one can save/delete a colour scheme. Four round buttons can be rotated to alter Brightness; Contrast; Hue; and Saturation (Current settings – in above order = -3345681; -5857290; -434;
-5857290
·S3Gamma Plus = Can save/delete colour scheme – current setting = calibration image & Link RGB. Three round buttons can be rotated to alter Gamma; Brightness; Contrast. Current settings for each button is “1.00”

The screen colors for my desktop & all my software packages etc are 100% – the only problem seems to be with DVD replay. That’s about as much info as I can give – can anyone help debug this frustrating issue?

[wtxcowboy]

try system restore to a point before you installed anything from samsung. i use natural color pro & magictune with no probs & use powerdvd & wmp. could be ur video driver needs updated as well?

[Matt Winter]

Thanks for the advice. Unfortunately I cannot go that far back for a system restore. My PC only seems to store the restore point for a limited time. I've installed the latest video card driver, but that has also not helped. What is so puzzling is that the playback color was originally fine even with the old driver, that is, until I started playing around with the color settings. After that nothing seemed to restore playback color to normal.
I need to be able to view lecture videos, but all I get now is a washed out picture that is 'unviewable'.
Do you have any other suggestions?

[lordsmurf]

Reinstall PowerDVD, which should also reinstall the Cyberlink MPEG codec.

[Matt Winter]

Thanks to you guys who have tried to help. I do appreciate it.
I had noticed that whenever my PC starts up a Magictune (Samsung) icon appears in the taskbar and I have to close it manually. In the program that I usually use to monitor programs that start-up at log-on, the Magictune application exe doesn't even appear, so I couldn't de-select it.

Last night I just happened to be updating another program that I've hardly used, "Autoruns", when I discovered that something called Magictuneengine.exe had a 'tick' mark in the specific box. I de-selected the program and this morning when I logg-ed on the icon no longer appeared in my taskbar. I somewhat sceptically went to PowerDVD and placed a DVD in the drive - I could hardly believe it - THE COLOR PROBLEM HAS BEEN SOLVED - COLORS ARE BACK TO NORMAL!!!

Obviously it was a subsiduary 'application' of the Magictune programthat was causing all the problems.