Video is too yellow/bright, as if a grossly exaggerated gamma transform is applied (raring regression)

[Max Bowsher]

Some video files play in totem in raring appearing far too bright and yellowish - the appearance is similar to an excessively strong application of a gamma transform.

To reproduce:

1) Download this video from youtube (~15MB): youtube-dl -f 18 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUgAgfO-16s

2) Open the downloaded file in totem, and the youtube page in a browser, and play them side by side simultaneously. The difference should be readily apparent, especially in the flaring on the "Game of Thrones" text in the title sequence and in the desert scenery.

Other media players such as vlc, xine-ui render the video correctly.

[Max Bowsher (maxb)]

It looks like this may be a totem bug specifically, as if I launch the same file playing simultaneously through totem, gst-launch-0.10 and gst-launch-1.0 by executing the following in a terminal:

totem rUgAgfO-16s.mp4 & gst-launch-1.0 playbin uri=file:///home/maxb/rUgAgfO-16s.mp4 & gst-launch-0.10 playbin uri=file:///home/maxb/rUgAgfO-16s.mp4 &

it is easy to see that only the totem playback displays the abnormal colouring.

[Max Bowsher (maxb)]

I think I've discovered mostly what had gone wrong - somehow in the process of going quantal->raring, either the various colour balance settings in totem got changed, or it changed how it interpreted the numerical values in dconf. When I dug around in dconf-editor, I found various colour-related settings under org.gnome.Totem, which, once reset to defaults, caused my display issue to go away.

The problem was exacerbated by bug 1162389 - the totem preferences dialog has become inaccessible - hence why I had to resort to dconf-editor to change them.

Thus, this bug becomes a question of how a visually sensible colour configuration on quantal ended up looking wrong after upgrading to raring.

[Paul White (paulw2u)]

We are sorry that we do not always have the capacity to review all reported bugs in a timely manner. You reported this bug some time ago and there have been many changes in Ubuntu since that time.

Ubuntu 13.04 (raring) reached end-of-life on January 27, 2014.

Has this issue affected any other release upgrades since?

Please let us know if you do otherwise this report can be left to expire in approximately 60 days time.

Thank you for helping make Ubuntu better.

Paul White
[Ubuntu Bug Squad]

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for totem (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]