[doveman2]

If something isn't done to properly balance the levels between Movies/TV, Music/iPlayer it simply makes it impossible to use XBMC for more than one of those without having to faff about increasing/decreasing the volume with numerous keypresses each time or risking damaging equipment/ears, so I'll have to just use it for Movies/TV for now.

But what you are asking is impossible, which is why xbmc on any platform, or any other media player doesn't do it.
Support I had used get_iplayer to download an iplayer video, and then played it? Should that also be treated like iplayer and attenuated more than other videos?
Support I then remuxed it into an mkv file? Should i still spot it and attenuate it?
Suppose I rip a DVD and run a tool to normalise the volume, so it also is as loud as iplayer? Should that be attenuated more than other ripped files that haven't been normalised?

The only options are to parse and decode the audio for the whole file (which may take as long as playing the whole file) to find the maximum amplitude level.
Or to use a dynamic scheme, where the volume varies whilst it plays (it could be set with a very long release so it only adjusts each time it sees a new maximum, and will typically be stable after a few seconds).
Or you do what everyone else does, and juggle the volume if it seems too quiet or too loud.

Course it's not impossible to balance Music and Movies/TV. If Movies/TV need to be boosted by 18db but Music doesn't, then you just need a boost that only applies to Movies/TV and not Music.

Sure, it might be impossible to identify a downloaded iPlayer video and treat it differently but that doesn't mean we shouldn't look at reducing the level when the plugin is streaming iPlayer so that it's about the same as everything else. Maybe people stream more than download from iPlayer, so doing this could make it much more usable for most people and those who do download are free to run the files through a program to reduce the volume.

Of course, if you mash up the volume on a DVD by normalising it, then it's going to be louder than other videos but we should be using the majority of properly encoded DVDs/Movies as our benchmark, not the odd one with ruined audio. I've got the odd video that appears to have been normalised and thus is quite a bit louder than the others, which is a pain but even then I think I only had to turn them down to around -10db and they were not as loud and overloading as when I played music.

You're focusing on worse case or problematic scenarios to suggest it's not worth trying to make the majority of sources work better, because you won't be able to achieve perfection as there'll always be some dodgy file that will still be too loud/quiet.

I can tell you that using Mediaportal, I can play TV, Movies or Music without having to worry about the volume blasting out (most of the time). It's using LAV to decode but I've got DRC and Mixdown disabled in that so I don't think that's doing anything to adjust the volumes (the Realtek control panel mixes down the multi-channel to Stereo but that doesn't do any volume processing either). iPlayer is louder still of course, because the source is normalised but I can use a profile in ffdshow to reduce volume (or normalise) flvs, which of course affects non-iPlayer flvs as well but I don't have any quality movies files as flvs and they only tend to be downloaded episodes of series, so normalising them isn't a big deal as they don't have great dynamic range to start with. It would of course be better to have the iPlayer plugin reduce the volume just for that.

For TV, I tend to use ffdshow (using a profile to affect only .ts files) as a post-processor to normalise and then reduce the volume, which helps prevent the large jumps in volume when the adverts come on (which the broadcasters always deny but everyone can hear) but it's not strictly necessary.

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Yes, it was a hack using an existing advancedsetting (adding new ones has a lot of resistance)

Ah I see, yes there can be a lot of resistance to change in the XBMC community

It should apply to stereo and multichannel sources, but I think the current build only applies to multichannel. I'll fix that in next update.

Thanks, that would make it a lot more usable (for those who are happy to have the audio compressed of course)