[legion1capone]

I am in the process of burning all of my movies to an external hard drive. I thought I would test it out and see how it looked on my 42" Panasonic plasma that has been setup in the service menu. Eventually I will be running my movies on XBMC. I have it on my computer I just don't have it hooked up to my TV as I don't have the correct cable.

How I set it up:
I took my hard drive and hooked it up through the USB cable provided to one of the USB ports on my PS3.
From there the PS3 is hooked up through HDMI to my Onkyo TX-SR707 and then from there to my TV through HDMI.

The Problem:
When I play a movie clip from the hard drive compared to the regular DVD played from the PS3, the black levels are horrible. I have gone into the TV menu and tried to adjust it to see if I could get the black level detail back but the information was simply not there. Why is this?

Is this because I am not using an expensive DVD burner?
Is it because the information is being passed through a USB 2.0 cable?
Could it be the PS3 that is the problem?

 

[lcaillo]

The hard drive output is usually going to output black at 0 rather than the output of 16 for black from a video source. You may be able to change that setting, perhaps not. If not, you simply need to calibrate the set around the difference and use different inputs for the two signal levels.

 

[legion1capone]

were would I be able to change this setting? When using XBMC I can adjust the brightness straight from the program and that helped a lot. Thank you for your reply.

 

[lcaillo]

It varies with the device. Some do not allow adjustments, some do.