[XorNot]

Honestly what I don't get is how this even happened though: it's been I think 10 years with no progress on getting the volume of things to equal out, even with all the fancy software we have. Like I would've thought that 5.1 should be relatively easy to normalize, since the center speech channel is a big obvious "the audience _really_ needs to hear this" channel that should be easy to amplify up in any downmix....instead watching anything is still just riding the damn volume button.

[pentaphobe]

Yeah it's wild - not only not improving but seemingly getting worse

doesn't seem like anyone outside the audience thinks it's a serious problem (?)

[lazide]

‘Am I really that out of touch? No, it’s the kids that are a problem’ - Skinner, from a show long long ago.

[account42]

With mpv you can use ffmpeg's dynaudnorm filter to fix this.

[sfn42]

I toyed with the idea of making some kind of app for this but while it may work on desktop it seems less viable for smart tvs which is what I primarily use.

Though I have switched to mostly using Plex, so maybe I could look into doing something there.

[account42]

This is exactly the reason I avoid appliances like smart TV where you have no control over the software. With my PC (for which my big TV is just a dumb display) I can use mpv with ffmpeg's dynaudnorm filter.

[pentaphobe]

I was toying with the same thing for a bit - the hope was if it worked well you could build it into a little unit (audio or HDMI eARC)

Doesn't solve for single units but could help with people who use soundbars or amps

Abandoned though - was basically just multiband compression and couldn't find a way to make it adaptable enough (some media always ended up sucking)

Would be super interested to hear what you tried!

[sfn42]

Never really tried anything. Just thought about it but I don't know the first thing about audio programming and like I said it doesn't seem viable for smart tvs anyway so I never did anything with it.

[Eisenstein]

Map the front speaker outputs to the side speakers and the problem will be mitigated. I have been using this setup for about 2 years and it lets me actually hear dialog.

[wombatpm]

Thankfully the ad supported streaming brings occasionally brings you back to a proper sound mix and volume level.