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[nuke2000]

Hi there

Is there any possibility of incorporating volume into the remembered settings of the playback info tag?

The scenaro i have (and i am sure i am not alone) is that i have many short movie clips (mostly music videos) which MC handles great and stores the aspect ratio & zoom settings of each file as set when it was last played. However, these files tend to have wildly different audio volumes and although i can adjust these volumes in the same was as zoom settings these settings are not tagged. If this could be incorporated into the playback info tag it would be perfect and allow a decent unnattended video jukebox experience.

Possible do you think?

Many thanks and keep up the good work

[nuke2000]

Sorry to bump this thread but does anyone know if there is another way to achieve what i am after without modification to MC itself? Some setting in direct show filters i don't know about perhaps?

Thank you

[brookb]

I too have the same concern.  I create random playlists with some audio and some video files.  The audio files all play 'nicely' using the auto leveling replay gain feature.  However, the video files do have wildly varying volume levels; some blast out way louder than the audio files, while others are very quiet and hard to hear.  It makes it pretty much impossible to set the volume high (for fear of blowing something up), or of letting it run unattended.

I realize that video files often utilize an external audio codec, and that may be one of the reasons its hard for MC to control the volume.  But I would hope there would be some kind of mechanism to send a 'control message' to the codec telling it to adjust its volume.  Then, a database field for volume gain could be used to send a volume adjustment to the codec.  Alternatively, JR could try to incorporate some audio codecs from CCCP or another 'free use' source into MC and thereby get control over the codec and its volume.

Another less desirable option would be to adjust the volume in the video files themselves.  But with compressed audio, I don't know if there's a way to do this without loss of quality.  I imagine you have to decode from a lossy format, adjust the volume, and re-encode back into the lossy format, resulting in loss of audio quality.  Does anyone know of a tool that can adjust video file volume - hopefully losslessly?   Or maybe there's a video file tag for volume that could be adjusted.  Does anyone know if there are 'volume' tags defined that audio codecs such as CCCP will follow to adjust their gain?

Thanks JR for a great product!  Hope to see it continue to get even better!

[Alex B]

Does anyone know if there are 'volume' tags defined that audio codecs such as CCCP will follow to adjust their gain?

I don't think DirectShow filters can store file specific volume settings, but as a workaround some filters provide DSP features that can normalize the played audio output.

FFDShow audio decoder: enable Volume > Normalize and set the max amplification to 300-500 % (for instance).

AC3Filter: enable DRC and increase its level setting (the slider is just below the DRC tickbox).

I attached screenshots (log in to the forum if you can't see the attachments).

[brookb]

Thanks for the info Alex!

I tried the ffdshow normalization option, and it is a definite improvement.  However, the normalization 'rides the gain' a couple of times a second, removing the dynamics from the video - quiet parts get louder, and loud parts get quieter.  My goal is to have a fixed adjustment per video - like the 'replay gain' does for audio files, so that the dynamics of the music in the video doesn't get squished by the constantly adjusting normalization.

Like I said, this is an improvement, and is certainly better than turning the option off when running in an un-manned mode where you don't want huge volume changes.  So thanks!  But if anyone has ideas on how to adjust the volume by a fixed amount on a per-video basis, without the dynamics-robbing tracking normalization turned on, I'd love to be able to do that.

Another thing I noticed.  I'm playing back on stereo speakers.  When playing AC3 encoded videos that have surround, the volume still goes way up.  Looking at the FFDSHOW audio decoder in the MIXER tab, you can see that all of the channels are getting mixed to the stereo pair at a full 1x multiplier.  Thus the front left is getting not only the full left front channel, but also the left rear, the center, and the LFE.  The mixer has a "normalize matrix" checkbox.  When I select that, it drops the multiplier to 0.25 (12 db lower volume).  That makes the volume too low.  Any ideas on how to get FFDSHOW to automatically encode any stereo or surround file down to a stereo downmix at approximately the same volume level?


Thanks!!!