No worries, I just wanted it to be clear that these guys should try disabling the 'minimal OSD during playback' setting even though your different problem wasnt affected by fix this setting disabled.
Here are my logs with the same problem. Recording starts very dark. I cannot seem to get it to lighten up but I also noticed that the OSD is not showing up either. I do not have minimal osd on playback enabled. I have tried VMR9 Fullscreen Exclusive and VMR9 Custom. LiveTV looks great.
Could the video brightness changing be something to do with video colourspace changing. Some video modes (by modes I mean RGB32, YUV2, YV12 etc) on PCs treat black as zero and white as 255. Others treat black as 16 and white as 230odd. Could that be what is changing brightness on some of the posts above?????
And I think?????? some modes have different brightness/ colour control settings.
I don't know if it's relevant but when I play a recording it starts dark. I press the blue button and it's back to normal. Just got sort of used to doing it now.