It would be nice to have a feature inside plex that would auto adjust the volume during loud and really quiet parts of movies.
I believe that would need to be a client feature and therefore would have to be written for each client. The only client that I have that seems to have such a feature now is Plex Media Player. On that client under Settings/Audio there is a setting called “Normalize Downmixed Volume.” I think that does what you are asking but I am not sure as I use a hardware solution for 95% of my TV and movie audio and I am not sure how effective it is.
I am not sure that there can reasonably be such a function for the purely digital audio via HDMI or optical. That kind of feature, for audio that is being sent in a digital form, is almost non-existent in the electronics world. To “normalize” volume effectively it seems that said audio must be in analog form.
When I bought my audio normalizers (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00008VWOJ?psc=1&redirect=true&ref_=oh_aui_search_detailpage it is no longer sold) I noticed a bunch of products that were supposed to do the same thing for digital audio via HDMI or optical but, since at that time all my equipment was component video and stereo audio via RCA cables, I bought the Terk as it was the best reviewed and was, at that time, at a good price.
The HDMI devices, there were a LOT of them, were in the same price range, mostly. Just recently I searched for such devices and could hardly find any and none were at a reasonable price and there were none I could find that were designed for digital audio. This makes me think that the digital devices just did not work well and therefore got pulled from the market.
There are TVs and receivers that are supposed to do the same thing internally but, of the ones I have heard, the only ones that work well are on the VERY high end of the price range. The one that I looked into how the volume normalizing feature was implemented did it this way: (using 5.1 sound as an example) they converted each channel to analog then they performed the normalizing function then they reassembled the stream and sent it along to the display device.
They also had to implement a video delay because the processing of the audio took time and, without the video delay, the audio and video would be out of sync.
Normalizing audio is a non-trivial function that would have to be done client side or, if done at the server, would, for digital audio, probably impose a pretty high performance penalty on the server.
I doubt that Plex could implement a server side solution that worked well with all clients. And most clients cannot do it well either because of lack of processing power.
The proper place for volume normalizing is in the TV or receiver not in the delivery system.
I think you are over estimating the amount of power that is needed for this. I have a sound bar on my TV that wasn’t very expensive at all that auto adjusts the volume quiet well. There is only optical audio going to it so it does it in real time with no delay in the audio. A feature like this could be as simple as setting an upper and lower range that the volume can not pass. Now I have no idea if that would make the audio sound like crap but I am guessing that is similar to how it works.
Also, couldn’t this be accomplished by the server if transcoding?
@Krs1 said:
Also, couldn’t this be accomplished by the server if transcoding?
I would assume so, maybe with direct streaming also.
Please vote here
as this has collected the most votes so far.
