As I mentioned in the Media Center 9 forum, I am looking for a way to mimic the replay gain function for video files. I have a growing collection of music videos that has a wide variety of sound levels. (avi/DivX)
You mentioned that an extra DB field could possibly be used by your plug-in to adjust the volume level during playback. If so this would be great. I do not know how the internals work, though the volume should of course not be an absolute setting, it should be a +/- of the current output volume.
Again, without knowing anything about what MC allows you to do...
Perhaps the best method would be to allow positive and negative numbers that would adjust the volume up or down from the current manually set level. The plug-in would have to remember the manually set level so that several songs with negative numbers would not just keep lowering the volume. (Just get the current volume, adjust for video/song, and then return to previous at end).
There may be a far better way of accomplishing this, and I am sure a better way of explaining it.
If this is possible without too much extra work, you can sign me up as one of your official plug-in users.
Thanks,
Lou
NOTE: If this is too easy... Then how about making it easy to set the volumes? This would be the procedure for the end user.
1) Set the volume to a pre-determined level.
2) Play the video/song
3) While it is playing the end user adjusts the volume to the desired reference level and then hits a menu option (or better yet a hot-key, even better make sure it can be triggered from a remote using Girder). This enters the value into the field for future playback.
Remember, this is just a thought from a lazy user! Just having the ability to manually enter a value in the database that adjusts volume on playback is more than I can ask for.