hey i hooked my htpc to a regular monitor, and it was pretty dim. i had to turn up the brightness on the nvida control panel.. anyone else have this problem

Yes. Certain players are set at certain default levels. I found zoom player to be much darker than windvd or powerdvd. You can change the settings on your video card, or within the player itself. It can be a real pain in the butt when you start adjusting contrast, brightness, gamma, hue, colors, as they all make a difference. I would recommend using one of the pre-made assist devices like avia (I think that is the name) to help set up your picture. I also saw some that someone put on this site for free that looked pretty nice.

PowerDVD works great for me,but I use ATI's catalyst control center for overlay adjustment.It adjusts brightness,gamma,saturation,hue,contrast,etc. on any program that uses video overlay.And you can save your settings easily.It works very well with most video cards(not just ati's).It's slow to start the program but that is really the only drawback I have found.It has good display controls with many force features.I give it a 4 out of 5.

I used to use zoomplayer and all that ffdshow jargon

Now i just use powerdvd, on the vivid setting.

yeah i had to use nvidias overlay ssetting. it wasnt too bad. but it was just strange to me that even with a regular crt monitor it was still pretty dim.