This Option would be Awesome!!!
This would be good for night time viewing, just add it as an option in the video settings so it only transcodes when turned on.
Friends soundbar is terrible watching films quietly at night and has no night time mode, so you get inaudible dialogue and then a loud sound effect noise. Can’t even turn it back to the TV speakers as all the HDMI connections run through it so the soundbar just turns itself back on. Looking online seems to be quite a common problem.
I used DSR Normalizer by Solar Wind.
It normalizes the loudness in video with professional accuracy and very fast! I did not find any analogues!
This would be a very useful feature for a number of reasons. I have a large library where it is not feasible for me to separately transcode or re-encode the videos (I need the originals and I simply don’t have enough disk space to make a copy of every file – nor would I want to). I noticed that Plex can attempt to normalize audio, but only if it is downcoding from 5.1 to stereo, so I don’t see why it would be too difficult to normalize when transcoding as well.
Steve, for the time being, how good are you with computers?
I would also very welcome it!
Cheers,
Vic
this is something kodi has FOR YEARS !!
Recently discovered it basically already has this feature but tends to adjust the volume to be quieter to a fault. My tv volume has to be maxed.!
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Bump to dead post? Would love this feature! Really curious as to why this hasnt been implemented yet. Seems like a very important feature for a media center.
Also really would love that feature.
Someone mentioned, that it would be not possible to do so because then we would need to transcode the audio by default.
But why not adding that feature to the client?
I mean, Kodi can do that. And Kodi transcodes noting.
I would also like to bump up this post.
It would be useful in movies where dialog is super quiet but then the explosions are over the top.
Dear Plex, everyone that asks me about Plex, I tell them NOT to do it because of this volume issue… You have lost out on at least 20 subscribers (and counting) because you insist on holding our volume hostage… Is your lust for holding this power worth losing subscribers???
Think about it… when you can barely hear anything… it renders the whole system virtually useless…
I understand using hyperbole to emphasize a position but, in this case, I think this is a bit over the top. There are many ways to fix or reduce the effect of the volume issue outside Plex including, but not limited to, hardware volume normalizing devices like this auto volume control device and others. There is also the fact that there are many tools that allow you to normalize volume during the encoding process. Handbrake works wonders on misbehaving files when configured to do so.
I do agree that, currently, it would be best to have such functionality inside Plex and most solutions do not have the ability to completely maintain separation of the various channels but saying that the system is useless because of this is not really helpful.
I used to think that volume normalization belonged outside the playing software but I have come around to thinking that Plex, and other programs of the same type like Emby, should do volume normalization inside their processing engine.
Most receivers have a “Night” mode or some such that help quite a bit but I have yet to find one that does “normalization” correctly or well at all.
It is unfortunate that Plex and Emby do not handle volume normalization correctly but I also think that it is harder to do than a lot of us think if you want to also maintain true five channel separation.
Because there are a LOT of users whose systems and/or encoding methods work correctly if Plex ever implements anything to fix the problem it should be optional and able to be applied selectively to the playback of videos.
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Well, I don’t think that we need to normalize the audio (per se) on the fly as that is too much work both for the device as well as the developer. But I think a better solution is to go more along the lines of an active gain unity “like” solution. In 20 words or less (if you don’t know what this is, and my apologies if you do)… passive gain unity only attenuates (turns down) sound so that it can never be louder than the source coming in…This is what Plex is now. Active gain unity allows you to attenuate OR add more volume than the source coming in.
This can create issues where people blow their sound systems because they can now push it into the red… but this is where I agree with your above statement, that “let us make our own mistakes” theory. But, with that being said, maybe it should be an advanced feature or something to enable the active gain unity.
However, if they only made this feature in the iOS client app, that won’t be that big of a problem. All my other devices (even other Apple products… TV, Mac desktops/laptops, etc…) are fine. But at the end of the day, doing it this way would be less CPU/device resources on the device’s hardware (battery life, heat, etc…), and from a development standpoint, it is much easier to do it that way rather than putting in an algorithm that will normalize 5 channels on the fly.
The other issue with normalizing it, the perceived volume would fluctuate immensely as if it is bringing the really quiet parts all the way up to 0, it is going to be a huge perceived volume difference than the loud parts that may already be at 0. For example, if you look at the waveform of an entire song… let’s say that the song that has the breakdown in the middle, you see that part is quieter, that is done on purpose. If we normalized that part, it would sound nutty loud and wouldn’t flow right. If they went through the normalize method, they would have to normalize the entire length of the audio at the same time and then leave it alone to prevent this problem… But then it would take 5+ minutes just to prepare your audio before you can watch anything and kill your battery while doing it.
Maybe Plex could just contract Spinal Tap as consultants to make it go to 11!!!
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Please stop saying this, you do not need to reencode the files to do this, in fact Plex uses the FFmpeg project and libavcodec which already has this feature built in. It will just need to be enabled.
If Plex was still opensource then I could do this but unfortunately it isn’t, but it is not difficult at all to do.
another thing that a lot of people don’t quite understand-
- normalization is aligning different audio to similar levels (ie like LOUD commercials and quiet tv shows), this is what replay gain allows for.
- COMPRESSION is what ‘night mode’ and similar other modes do, that make it so louder and softer sounds are similar in volume. Like an actor whispering next to a jet engine. Which in real life, you obviously would only hear the jet engine. This is called dynamic range. The difference between silence and max loudness.
If you think that’s bad you should watch Human Traffic, lol
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2021 clean-up: duplicate
