Audio DRC (Dynamic Range Compression) for video playback, a.k.a. “night mode”, has been a long-standing Kodi feature request. Googling will bring up demand for it going back for many, many years. The response to this request has invariably been that modern home theatre systems and/or digital amplifiers take care of that just fine. Which is absolutely true, but I humbly submit that there is a significant number of Kodi users out here who don’t have that sort of hardware. I’m out in the sticks in South Africa, trying to get by on a very limited budget, and in my case that means a 15 year old TV and a simple analog stereo amplifier (which has a volume knob and nothing more) and I know that I’m not the only one in such a position. There are many parts of the world where this sort of thing is the norm. I realize that most Kodi users live in the US and Europe where advanced audio systems are in ample supply and affordable, and in other countries some are lucky enough to have a decent budget affording them decent audio systems at whatever these cost locally. But there are plenty of Kodi users who are not in that category – my personal estimate this may account for up to 20% of all Kodi users.
So for those of us who don’t have (and can’t get) audio systems capable of performing DRC, implementing this in Kodi would be a godsend! Downmixing 5.1 to 2.0 AAC is well known for drowning out dialogue in overly loud background sounds and music, and DRC would go a long, long way to making this easier to live with. And speaking from a standpoint of complete ignorance, I can’t see this being very complicated. Just run all audio samples through an array of scalars (the latter following one of several selectable compression curves) to multiply each sample with the appropriate factor should do it. (Yes, I know the hack of cranking the audio amplification up to the max and then reducing the volume to almost nothing, but that has its limitations, not to mention the reduction in audio quality. It’s not proper DRC by any stretch of the imagination.)
I know that those of us who don’t have DRC in our audio systems are a minority… But please, PLEASE consider it…
Thank you!
// FvW