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Comment by dylan604 | Hacker News Reader

but it's not. it's right there in what you quoted. the louder ads are coming from an ad provider. ad providers are the problem.

loudness doesn't have a standard. different streamers want different loudness settings. ad platforms would have to have multiple audio streams limited to the different loudness settings. it's not a hard problem in the least, but one of adding to the complexity of content management.

or the streaming platforms could take over ad delivery and take it on as part of their internal content management.

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> but it's not. it's right there in what you quoted. the louder ads are coming from an ad provider. ad providers are the problem.

Then the streaming services are failing to punish their ad providers, so they still have culpability.

Option 3: Streaming platforms add to their contracts with ad delivery networks that they must faithfully represent a ReplayGain value in the metadata of every advert before delivery. The streaming platform can then have its clients adjust the volume they play adverts at.

Bonus: the clients can sample the advert audio and send back the computed ReplayGain, compared to the claimed ReplayGain. Add a penalty clause in the contract for every single advert delivered louder than claimed.

> loudness doesn't have a standard

It literally does. Audio players were implementing ReplayGain support 25 years ago.

> ad platforms would have to have multiple audio streams limited to the different loudness settings

This is trivial to solve. You have a standardized volume and a scale factor for each service. Or you use ReplayGain or similar for the same.

> it's not a hard problem in the least

No, it’s really not.

Replaygain works reasonably well for modern music, as do the LUFS units.

The problem with video content is there can be extended very quiet parts. If you try to bring the “average” volume of an ad to the same “average” volume as the last 30 minutes of a drama it could end up being insanely low. The average level of the drama being low due to long quiet parts.

Not always the case but this problem isn’t as simple as it might seem.

My main hope is that this doesn’t kick off a “loudness war” for tv/movie content on streaming in an effort to get its average volume up as high as the ads.

The advert is 30s long or thereabouts. Its ReplayGain value would be accurate, if fairly computed.

The streaming service decides where the ad breaks are. For video on demand, which is most streaming, they can precompute the ReplayGain for the 30s of video leading into the ad break.

For live video, the client can compute it.

Either way, the client can then adjust the volume of the ad to account for any difference in perceptual volume.

We can have a volume normalization ceiling function in the final pass of video data compression stream for the ads injection section. The volume normalization variable can be chosen by the stream er so that the ads' volume would be clamped below the maximum of the streamed content volume.

Conceptually I don't see how hard it is for the stream provider to implement this. Whether they want to implement is another story.

>loudness doesn't have a standard

If you can't create, copy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBU_R_128

You can do volume normalization, it's a thing. Lets not pretend this is some black magic.

Probably makes more sense here to use a compressor at the end of the chain right? It would be kind of surprising to me if there isnt one already..

what about anything I said suggested this is black magic? I specifically talked about the steps to properly adjust the loudness.

>louder ads are coming from an ad provider

Ad is coming from provider. Volume is not.

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