Video settings, whites washed out

[mongolpope2]

In older videos especially, whites are blasted and wash over details in the video. Are there recommended settings to bring the video levels to something reasonable? I'm talking brightness or contrast settings. Adjusting only those is compromise. Is there any method to make the videos have a normal brightness range, be it some renderer or codec or something?

I mean come on. Look at those screenshots. It's fucking ridiculous.

 

[SamKook]

I use the SmoothAdjust or AutoAdjust avisynth plugin to fix that when I encode my videos which you could set up to use when playing them without having to re-encode them but that's a bit of a pain to do.

What you might be able to do with some players or something is crop the color range to TV mode(forgot what it's called exactly but has TV in it) which will fix extreme whites but also mess with the blacks(which may or may not be noticeable to you).