ffmpeg filter for dynamic range compressor

goodyet

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Many movies with audio down-sampled from 5.1 to stereo result in very low volume for dialogues and extremely high volume for action scenes. In many cases the dialogues become inaudible even if the player volume is raised to the full and action scenes become irritative with the same volume levels. So most people end up turning volume up and down at movie-watching sittings. When I was using vlc to play movies on my laptop, I had used dynamic range compressor feature described here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/LifeProTips/comments/1me06t/lpt_if_a_movie_is_too_low_during_dialogues_use/

I bought a smart tv recently which can play content from removable media and dlna. But the tv does not have a inbuilt dynamic range compressor. When I googled for a solution, I came across Dynamic Audio Normalizer which is a filter built into the recent release of ffmpeg. Ffmpeg is a commandline video encoding/decoding tool. As I have been using ffmpeg on Linux for some time, I downloaded a recently built/compiled ffmpeg static build and ran it on a file I had. This is the command I used:

Code:
ffmpeg -i my_movie_with_bad_volume.mp4 -af dynaudnorm -vcodec copy output.mp4

The result was unbelievable when I played the output.mp4 file. I just turned up the volume of my analogue stereo amp to 9 O'clock position and had crystal clear dialogues and very normal volume at action scenes.

As ffmpeg did not process the video track, my old dual core pentium laptop took less than 5 minutes to process the audio.

Those who want to try it, you can download ffmpeg from here: https://ffmpeg.org/download.html
 
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