I'm convinced this isn't a gstreamer issue at all, but rather a bug or "feature" in totem's GUI that resets a bad default XV_CONTRAST setting in its interface for Intel chipsets. This could be fixed in totem or in xserver-xorg-video-i810, being in the latter if XV_CONTRAST is given a default value that's non-standard compared to every other driver (which is feasible, given that no other chipsets aside from Intel's appear to suffer from this bug).
I installed totem-xine and followed my own instructions again as listed in comment 84, and the same behaviour is noted. It's definitely due to totem's GUI and/or the Intel driver, specifically with XV_CONTRAST handling. To complicate matters even further, the bug may be fixed for 9xx chipsets if Lionel's reports are accurate, but not on older chipsets. -- totem overrides XV_CONSTRAST to wrong default value (Xv movies on i810/i945 have horrible colour/gamma) https://launchpad.net/bugs/32963 -- desktop-bugs mailing list desktop-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/desktop-bugs
