Digital Home Thoughts: Black Levels: VLC Media Player vs. Windows Media Player

I've been doing some encoding experiments lately (with some phenomenal software that I'm writing a review of), and I noticed something interesting: when I encoded to h.264 and WMV, I saw significant differences in the black levels between the two - but what I didn't realize what that the differences I was seeing were from the players, not the files themselves. I'm a huge fan of VLC Media Player, but it has trouble with WMV files, so I view WMV files with Windows Media Player 11. Initially it looked like the WMV file had deeper black levels, and the h.264 file had lighter black levels, but once I played back the WMV file and the h2.64 file in VLC, I saw that it was really VLC. So what's the point here? If you want rich, deep black levels, use Windows Media Player whenever possible. VLC seems to maintain shadow details a bit better, so if you prefer that look, use VLC.