Music DVD Volume Control

[kangaloo]

I run a bar in Thailand and have quite a collection of Music Video DVD's that all play at different volume levels.
It is driving me nuts as i am trying to look after customers but need to constantly attend the volume control on the remote for each song with some songs being very quiet and some blasting you out of your seat.

I am playing the Music DVDs on a PC--through Windows Media Player 12 with Windows 7 through an HDMI Cable to My TVs around the bar.

The Music DVD files are all .VOB

I have tried a couple of programs that state they can carry out Automatic volume control but they are useless.
A friend said to me that I need to make all the bitrates the same but I have been told that is false information.

Is there any programs that you may know of that can solve this problem??? or do i need to run my Music DVD Videos through an external device??? such as a receiver used in Home Theatre??? .

Any help here would be greatly appreciated Cheers !

[kypec]

You could try foobar2000 (http://www.foobar2000.org/) player which could make use of Replaygain (http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=Replaygain) feature very nicely for your case but it's only a music player so you get no video output at all :(
Perhaps your only chance is to re-encode all your DVD collection while normalizing (applying same loudness) to all audio tracks...

[QuantumRand]

I'm still new to all this, so I don't know much, but the best thing I can think of would be to split the audio from the videos (being very diligent about naming them so you can match them back to the right video later), and then use something like MP3again to normalize the audio. Then remux the normalized audio files back to their respective video files.

[hello_hello]

Software such as VirtualDJ (http://www.virtualdj.com/) has an autogain function. I don't think it uses anything as intelligent as replaygain but it normalizes audio to 0db which is probably better than nothing. Making the bitrates the same is definitely false information.

As has been suggested, normally you'd just run replaygain on the files, save the info as tags and use a player which supports replaygain, but I've no idea how you'd do it easily using vob files.

There's a few compressor plugins for Winamp. I actually use one with ffdshow for compressing the audio in movie soundtracks. Will Windows Media Player use ffdshow's audio decoder? If so, you could try a compressor. There's a free compressor plugin for Winamp which I use with ffdshow, and it's actually designed to level the volume of music rather than the purpose for which I use it. I posted about it here (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=162433). Obviously you'd set it up differently for compressing music, but it'll give you a general idea.

[Ghitulescu]

A friend said to me that I need to make all the bitrates the same but I have been told that is false information.
Good joke.
Is there any programs that you may know of that can solve this problem??? or do i need to run my Music DVD Videos through an external device??? such as a receiver used in Home Theatre???

Not in the sense you think. As suggested before you should demux each video clip, normalize the audio (but not automatic, use your ears and forget numbers like 98%), remux it back and play them as before. A lot of work that AFAIK cannot be automatised (maybe you give this task to a local boy for a penny or two).

[smok3]

a. should be scriptable somehow, for example:

--------

loop over all the vobs:
ffmpeg -i some.vob pipe to replaygain which stores some.vob.rginfo.txt
end loop

mplayer (maybe) some.vob -volume from some.vob.rginfo.txt

--------

1st thing to try is if mplayer would work fine with hdmi stuff

or
b. reencode the audio part with replaygain hardcommited and remux back to your vob/mkv/mpg whatever and use your wplayer as you do it now (video will stay the same)
(this should be scriptable as well)

edit: when i say replaygain i actually think "track replaygain" or similar solution like EBU r128 standard.

[Ghitulescu]

I did not contest that the process can be "scripted". What I contest is that the normalisation can be done automatically, as various sources have various dynamics and amplitude (compare Jazz, Bethoven and HipHop).

[smok3]

Ghitulescu: how about reading on replaygain and EBU r128 first? (Ghitulescu, notice: I don't want to be evil, but you are on my ban list from now on, enough is enough.)

[diogen]

I am playing the Music DVDs on a PC--through Windows Media Player 12 with Windows 7 through an HDMI Cable to My TVs around the bar.Look into AC3Filter.

IIRC, it has the capability to "normalize" volume output. At least it had a couple years ago...:)

And it can be inserted into the playback chain so every DirectShow player uses it.

Try it in graphedit first.

Diogen.

[Ghitulescu]

I didn't know that replaygain works with Dolby Digital. DD have a similar information called dialnorm, if proper mastered.

[hello_hello]

I didn't know that replaygain works with Dolby Digital. DD have a similar information called dialnorm, if proper mastered.

Dialog normalization is, as it's name suggests, is used for the purpose of normalizing dialogue, the theory being you should be able to go from one movie to another and the dialog level for each will be the same. I could be wrong, but I'm not sure I've ever heard of it being used for anything else, such as normalizing music videos.

[hello_hello]

If I was going to try to achieve what the original poster needs to do I'd probably go about it this way (at least for want of being able to think of a better method at this point). At first I thought no matter how you went about it, it'd be a big job, but thinking about it, it probably doesn't have to be hugely time consuming. At least for someone who's familiar with computers and/or has experience with using the appropriate software. Each step should be fairly easy to automate. Well.... I'm not sure about the final one, I'll need some help there.
I can't think of an easy method of working with vob files directly. So.....

The first step would be to use eac3to to extract all the audio streams from the vob files. I'd use eac3to as it won't matter if the audio is AC3 or MP2 etc, and if there's a delay used in the audio stream eac3to should automatically add silence to compensate so there's no need to worry about audio delays later. That should be a fairly easy process to set up and run as a single job. I assume a GUI for eac3to such as HD Streams Extractor will make it easy, if there's not a better way.

The next step would be to convert the audio. A decent audio converter should be able to run ReplayGain on all the audio files first, save the ReplayGain info as tags, and then use the ReplayGain info in the tags to adjust the audio while converting (foobar2000 has no problem scanning both AC3 and MP2 audio and saving the ReplayGain info as tags). Or, if you convert to MP3 (which is what I'd probably do) you could convert first, ReplayGain second. Either way it's just one job scanning all the audio and a second job to convert it all.

As I'd go for the second option (convert to MP3 first, then ReplayGain), once all the audio is converted to MP3 it's just a matter of opening the lot with MP3Gain and letting it go to work losslessly adjusting the volume. Or foobar2000 will do the same thing (MP3 is the only format which will allow you to adjust the volume losslessly so for other formats you'd need to scan first).

The final step, and this is where I'm not sure how to automate it, would be to combine the original video with the new audio while removing the old. My instinct would be to remux the lot as MKVs as that way the aspect ratio information would be maintained and of course, the video doesn't need to be converted. I just wouldn't know where to begin to automate the process. I'm sure it can be done..... anyone with any clever ideas?

There is another method of achieving a similar result which can easily be automated, and would probably take less "people" time, but no doubt it'd keep the computer busy for a while. Simply use a conversion program such as AutoGK to convert the whole lot to AVI (using MP3 audio). I suggest AVI, because someone's written little utility called AVI Gain (http://forum.videohelp.com/threads/255147-Mini-Guide-Normalizing-Audio-for-Multiple-AVI-files) which will automatically demux the audio from a folder of AVIs, run MP3Gain on them, then remux the adjusted audio back into the AVIs. I did test it myself briefly a while ago and it works, although I didn't test it thoroughly enough to know if it'll handle any delay in the audio stream correctly.