Replacing stock video card w/G550 caused all TV images to go very dark

[IVB]

Just swapped out the video card that came with my VAIO for the G550. All of a sudden, and only in Sage, my image is unusable [i.e., the TV window is very dark]. This is true both for recorded programs that I watched yesterday and were fine, as well as live TV.

Here's the weird thing: Playing mpegs directly via WMP makes them look okey dokey. It's only when playing from within Sage that I have an issue. I even just recorded something and inside Sage I could see darkness, whilst within WMP I had happiness.

I've played with pretty much every s/w setting.

If it matters, I have a digital Samsung 191T 19" flat panel, connected via DVI interface.

Any advice on how to proceed?

[wanderer]

This sounds like an overlay calibration problem. Sage may be using DXVA Hardware acceleration, whereas WMP may not. Sometimes there are big differences in the overlay defaults between the two. Do you have DirectX9 installed?

If you are using filters from a DVD player (WinDVD, PowerDVD, etc) try opening the MPG file using the DVD player itself. If it looks OK with hardware accelertion turned off, then turn hardware acceleration on and see how that looks. This may give us an idea as to where the problem really is.

[IVB]

So good news and bad news: Good news is that your post helped me fix it, bad news is that I have no idea what exactly you said or why it fixed it. Hence I don't know if I'm now "happy" or not.

The few words I understood in your post were "hardware acceleration", so I went with the "default" mpeg decoder and now everything works ok. I don't know what filters are so I probably am not using them.

I did install DX9 as SS needed it during my dual trial of that & Sage.

Thanks for the help.