[Living Legend]

I just got the Chromebox and installed OpenELEC on it.

Everything is running quite fast with minimal issues.

My wife keeps complaining about something however, which I've picked up on too. Volume seems to vary quite drastically from scene to scene on certain shows and movies. She's watching Phantom of the Opera now. Any scene where they sing gets quite loud and when they're talking you can barely here them. Yesterday we were watching tv shows and we had to mute it if a commercial came on because those were very loud, but the show itself was not.

Any idea? Certain settings we can possibly tweak?

[Matt Devo]

audio output device? connected how? to what?

[Living Legend]

audio output device? connected how? to what?

Simple setup.

Chromebox HDMI output to Vizio HDMI input.

[Matt Devo]

Simple setup.

Chromebox HDMI output to Vizio HDMI input.

- ensure dynamic range compression is enabled in the Kodi Audio Output settings (forget the exact setting name)
- ensure all audio processing is disabled on your TV

[Soli]

That's just the way it is, it's called dynamics. But it's probably a little more complicated than that.
First off the commercials are louder, to get Your attention. That means that they have to lower the loudness of movies and programs. Since there is no standard way of doing this, I suspect that the loudness varies from program to program, and movies to movies, and not least channel to channel. That means that the commercials can be somewhere from a little louder to very much louder than the programs/movies. (Since the commercials always are at maximum/near maximum levels , plus theyre heavily compressed, so they are like loud nonstop. Search for loudness war on youtube for an example)

And what Matt said, only that the dynamic range compression in Kodi only works if the audio is in Dolby Digital.

[Matt Devo]

what are these "commercials" of which you speak?

[Soli]

I dunno. Burger King, McDonalds?