For some reason all my .wmv clips suddenly decided to start playing really dark on my laptop, not sure why. It's not a problem with the files themselves, I've uploaded a couple to my Myspace profile and they display fine. It only seems to be .wmv's, and I can't find any "default settings" for brightness or contrast I might've accidentally screwed up. Already tried uninstalling, downloading, & reinstalling Media Player, no dice, as well as running all my antivirus & anti-spyware stuff, defrag harddrive, etc. One of my more computer-capable buddies suggested I use System Restore to roll back to before the problem started, but none of my restore points work; they all error out and I get a message saying no changes were made. Any ideas? This is really putting a crimp in my video editing projects...

Laptop is a couple-years-old 17" HP Pavilion dv9000 Entertainment PC running Windows XP Media Center.

up grade your media player !!! or do on-line update with windows...might do the trick

I'm pretty sure I got everything on the up and up...like I said, one of the things I tried was uninstalling WMP, downloading a fresh install from the Windows site, and using that to reinstall it. I would think that'd give me the latest and greatest, right?

What kind of graphics card does it have, see if you can tweak any settings specific to the format. Try another .wmv player such as winamp or something like that and see if the same thing is happening, make sure your graphics card is updated to the latest and greatest drivers.

Assuming I'm looking at the right thingie here (I'm not much of a hardware guy, that's my goofy brother's claim to fame), it's an nVidia GeForce Go 6150. I'll try updating everything & grab Winamp, & get back to ya

Limited tweaking options available, download the latest forceware driver's for it and test it with winamp.

It worked for the longest time before, I think it only started doing this after one of my California friends sent me videos they took when I was there on vacation. Certainly there's a way to get it to work again.

...But then again, I've had dumber things happen

I have two options for you. The main thing that sounds like is happening is you need to upgrade your codec's. to update all of them just get the K-Lite codec pack

http://www.filehippo.com/download_klite_codec_pack/

But my recommended method of running ALL video files is VLC player. Its Open-source (Free) and runs 90% of all video files.

http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

Hope this helps

ya vlc is a better player...but maybe the Mplayer setting got changes somehow?