How do you handle volume level in flash and silverlight plugins?

Dev Community Dev/API Corner
1

I've sort of given up just asking why Netflix volume control is broken, and I started to go through the dev documentation and the source that's available on github for individual plugins.

 

This is probably nonsensical to anyone that drives a home theater directly, but for us old-fashioned types pulling analog 2 channel audio off a soundcard, the plex volume control is how we control the volume.  It seems to generally act as a volume control for the plex client app - playing back local audio/video always provides reliable volume control.  Playing back from flash or silverlight, not so much (in the past flash volume would always be 100%, currently it looks like this might be the case with silverlight).


What's really unclear to me is just which part of Plex is dealing with volume control.  I see nothing in the plugins for this - there are targets for progress bar, start/stop, seek, etc. but I see no target to look for any particular flash or silverlight volume control widget.  Is this correct?

 

If so how is the audio routed from the running flash or silverlight plugin to the plex client?  Which component is adjusting the audio output level?  PMS (where the plugin is running), the Plex client, or the plugin itself (using the flash/silverlight player's volume control)?

2

Channel plugins have no control over volume. The Plex client is what handles volume control. In cases of Flash and Silverlight (webkit-based) channels, I think the general assumption is that the default volume for the streaming video is adequate as a starting point for volume control. In cases where the default volume is low or even muted, it *may* be possible to add a step to the initialization process for the video capture/transcode. If the Flash player allows for relatively straightforward control of the volume through Javascript, keystroke, or simple mouse click, then the site config file may be modified to set the volume level before proceding to video playback.

Once video playback has begun, there is no way for the plugin to receive or handle volume commands.