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this is something i have always wanted. the dynamic range in movies these days is huge. generally that is a good thing, but sometimes not. if you are trying to watch a movies with someone sleeping in the next room it's a pain.
set the volume so that you can understand the dialog in a quiet scene, and you get blasted when the music kicks in during an action scene.
being able to compress the dynamic range of movies would be a great addition to xbmc.
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pike
Team Kodi Admin
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this might be easier to accomplish than i first thought. but it would have to happen at the "core" level. we use mplayer and mplayer use ac3filter (afaik). ac3filter supports drc (dynamic range compression)
:o
maybe a dev could take a look at it after 1.0?
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ah, it's already been asked for. shiny!
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some home cinema receivers has a nice night mode function.
i have no idea if it’s even possible in some way, but it would be a nice feature to have in xbmc if you (as i) don’t have it on your receiver.
it's a limiter that limits the volume so you don’t need to be so active with the tv remote between explosions and whispers...
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not much else to say really... i want dynamic range control functions for analogue dolby digital output
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it's set to full drc at the moment.
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so it is possible? (i wasn't sure if this was handled by mplayer exclusively and therefore not within realm of possibility for the xbmc developers)
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it was always possible.
too many people complained about volume, so i set it on full permanently.
i guess it could be moved to mplayer.conf so it can be modified.
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Etrai
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i don't even know if this is even plausible, but i think it would be really nice to have a compressor like "volume control" where you could input appropriate parameters to get, essentially, on the fly normalization of audio playback, with whatever drawbacks it might have. i've seen this kind of thing for mixing and music creation applications, such as mixmeister and propellerhead reason, being done in real-time. while xbmc is an incredibly feature rich (i, by chance, discovered that xbmc can play compressed video just the other week ^^) it does in my opinion lack certain audio capabilities when playing music from a more or less extensive mp3 archive. it's simply too cumbersome to have to use tools like mp3gain on any practical amount of music. and by "practical" i mean enough music to keep people pleased at a party ^^
i hope i won't get too badly burnt for this ^^
// Etrai
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just some notes:
1. xbmc does have a compressor, but it's only enabled for videos.
2. it would be trivial to add the same thing for music, but i don't see the point really as most music is so compressed nowadays that additional compression is pointless. if anything, you actually want to normalize downwards.
3. xbmc supports replaygain. any decent encoder should be able to add replaygain data (must check and add to our lame and vorbis encoders if we don't do it in xbmc). xbmc also supports a default preamp level for non-replaygained tracks.
4. on the fly "normalisation" is not possible without knowing information about the loudest and quietest parts of the track in advanced. (aka have replaygained it). one possible suggestion for this is have xbmc store the min and max values once playback has finished on a track so that next time around they're replaygained. this may be added post 2.0 as it requires a database change.
i recommend just adding replaygain tags to your music as you encode. you can get masstaggers that'll do it for all your music collection in one go if that's what you're after (it'll take a while, but it's a one off hit).
cheers,
jonathan
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we are both talking about compression in the same sense - we are referring to the dynamic range (ie ratio of loudest sound to quietest sound) of the music.
most music nowadays is compressed way more than it should be (ie reduced dynamic range) in order to boost the overall volume of the music, so that it "jumps out" more when it's played on the radio (who tend compress the dynamic range even more).
and anything xbmc does to record the volume minima and maxima will not be recorded to the files themselves - rather it will be stored in the database file.
i reiterate though: nothing will happen in this regard until after 2.0. even after then, it's not exactly something that has a high priority, given that it's trivial to replaygain your files to begin with.