Minor audio issue - DVD's are quieter

[Mortanis]

Whenever I play a DVD, I've got to up the speaker volume by a suprising amount to get the same audio level as watching recorded/live TV. In my system's audio control panel (NForce chipset), i've got all my audio options maxed.

Is there any setting in sage that I can utelize to up the volume level? It's a bit annoying to have to increase and decrease the volume so much switching between media.

Especially with the ever prevalent bug where pausing what I'm watching causes the volume level in sage to reset to maximum.

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by Mortanis

Whenever I play a DVD, I've got to up the speaker volume by a suprising amount to get the same audio level as watching recorded/live TV. In my system's audio control panel (NForce chipset), i've got all my audio options maxed.

DVDs can often be "quieter" because they maintain a much higher dynamic range, or probably more correctly have a higher crest factor than many other sources of audio.

Simply DVDs and TV/Music probably have the same maximum level, but a DVD will have a much lower average level than say TV or music. TV is often normalized so it's easier to hear in more environments, and music (don't get me started) often is "compressed" to make it sound louder for the radio.

DVDs OTOH, are genrally mastered such that audio is at -29dB (IIRC) so that dialog is at 74dB and can peak to 105dB

One thing you can try, is to set the Dynamic Range Compression (DRC) on your Dolby Digital decoder (be it software or a reciever) to "Night" or "Compressed".

[wolfpackmars2]

I have the same problem. However, I notice that when I play the DVD with powerDVD directly (instead of through Sage) that the volume starts out the same, but I notice that the powerDVD "internal" volume control is at half by default. If I turn this volume control all the way up, then the volume is normal. Unfortunately, this setting doesn't affect the Encoder link that SageTV uses. This was a big problem, and eventually I started playing DVDs outside of Sage through powerDVD directly (the powerDVD app saved my sound settings).

I don't think it's a matter of DVDs being quieter, but somehow we need to figure out how to adjust the powerDVD volume settings ?? This is my opinion, I have no idea how to do this, but hopefully for someone much smarter than me, this can get some ideas goin'.

[jhh]

Hi,

I had the same problem - it's not the dynamic range therefore the difference in volume is too big. I also noticed that when I played the disk with Powerdvd on the same machine that soundlevel was normal.
The problem went away for me when I changed decoders for dvd playback. I had the Powerdvd dcoders also before I changed.
I have only dvds in imported video I don't use the actual disk but I don't think that will make a difference.

Jan

[null_pointer_us]

Same here.

I also ran into a problem where switching between TV and DVD playback in SageTV would fiddle around with the Wave Volume (which is separate from the Master Volume) and set it to a low amount (i.e. < 50%). To fix this I started my sound card's mixer applet and watched what different actions in Sage do to the Wave slider. Then I reset the Wave volume level.

Oh and one minor gripe about DVDs: whoever is in charge of sound production for them seems to think it's a good idea to double the volume of the music in relation to speech and then separate short sequences of said music with scenes of whisper-quiet conversation. How I hate babysitting the remote control! I would love to see some automatic volume leveling in SageTV 5 someday.