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I have asked a similar question before, but we are still having the same issues.

Background color of MP4 rendering incorrectly in QuickTime

I am trying to encode MP4's for playback on a website. I have created a test page so you can see the problem I am having. The original video is created in After Effects. When the page displays correctly the video should match the background (so should be unnoticeable apart from while loading).

http://videooptimization.azurewebsites.net/

The MP4 file was encoded via Adobe Media Encoder

PAL, 25 fps, Progressive

No Audio, 2.06 Mbps

The difference in rendering seems to change depending on machine. My machine renders the video perfectly in IE10 and not in Chrome or Safari, my colleagues machine renders the video fine in Chrome and Safari, but not in IE10 (so an exact swap of issue). We both run Windows 8. There are also similar problems on Macs.

IE10 Screenshot enter image description here

Chrome Screenshot enter image description here

Safari Screenshot enter image description here

Can anyone tell me what is going on / how I can create an MP4 that will render identically cross platform and device?

Thanks.

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    Based on the screen shots I do have one additional thought. Since you are using a gradient, it could also be a difference in how the gradient is rendered by the browser. Have you tried using a constant background?
    – AJ Henderson
    Jul 3, 2013 at 13:08

1 Answer 1

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Unfortunately you are not going to be able to accomplish your goal. Two major factors impact this. First, color processing on different systems is going to differ. This will result in slight differences in the colors that are displayed because many video players apply "enhancements" to video and what you actually see when viewing the video in a browser is an embedded player that is installed on the local machine.

Second, different software is also going to use different implementations of a decoder which may result in slight differences in color based on optimizations and rounding error based on how they do their calculations to get the video out. It's just a side effect of the way the players operate, there isn't a problem with your source (as the data in the file can't change from one player to another.)

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  • Ok, thanks for your reply. Not the answer I was hoping for, we are finding the differences in colours to be quite extreme
    – Tom
    Jul 2, 2013 at 14:45
  • @Tom - how extreme is quite extreme? I could easily see the square when I opened your demonstration link, but I wouldn't exactly have called it extreme.
    – AJ Henderson
    Jul 2, 2013 at 18:38
  • Have added screenshots. Maybe not so extreme, but certainly noticeable. Also seems odd that the results are reversed for me and my colleage when we both have the same operating system and machines pretty much and the same colour profile set (sRGB IEC61966-2.1). We do have different graphics cards, will this be causing the difference in rendering (seems strange it would)? I suppose is not much we will be able to do, but would be interested to find out what is causing the difference
    – Tom
    Jul 3, 2013 at 9:47

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