I have a strange problem that all clips in kdenlive have washed out colors (missing saturation).

When the clip is paused the saturation is closer to the correct color, but still not correct.
When the clip is played the saturation is even worse (like it is being desaturated 2x more).

This is a standard mp4 h264 clip created with ffmpeg.

If I render the clip without any filters or any effects it also comes out desaturated.
So kdenlive output != input no matter what I try.

Below are a couple of screenshots. On the left I have the clip in SMPlayer where the
colors are displayed correctly. On the right is Kdenlive with the clip paused. Note
the desaturated colors:

http://i.imgur.com/QFS4pME.png

And here's an example with the clip playing in Kdenlive. Notice how the colors
are even more washed out now:

http://i.imgur.com/20d7MZb.png

Why is this happening? Is it a bug...the same washed out colors are also in
the rendered clip. Is there any way to fix it?

Using Kdenline 0.9.10 from the Sunab PPA for Ubuntu 14.04.

EDIT
Seems to be some sort of color space issue.

The initial mp4 file is encoded as yuvj420p (pc luma range 0-255), while
the Kdenlive rendered output is yuv420p (tv luma range 16-235).

Hours of reading later this seems to be a rather complex issue, as ffmpeg
(and Kdenlive) apparently doesn't always interpret yuvj420p correctly(?)

So we have two issues going on here:

1: Rendering of monitor output is inconsistent between play and pause.
Kdenlive seems to use different rendering pipelines for the paused image
and playback video. Which one is showing the correct colorspace?

2: Internal representation of yuvj420p is unknown..where in the
rendering/conversion pipeline does something go wrong..

Best explanation I could find is here:
https://web.archive.org/web/20131230185 ... range-flag

Summary: it's a big mess, and only duct tape seems to be available for solving it.. :-/