[pulseaudio-discuss] Standardising on the amount of software amplification is presented to the user

[Colin Guthrie]

Hi,

I'm trying to solve a bug where by mplayer is clamping the volume at
100%. If someone turns up the volume to >100% using e.g.
gnome-volume-control, hitting volume up or down in mplayer will reset it
to 100% again.

For a quick straw poll:

 g-v-c: 150%
 pavucontrol: 100%
 kmix & phonon: 100% (I wrote this so only me to blame!)

 vlc: 400% (but does not yet use PA per-application volume control).
 mplayer: 100%

+ numerous others.


Now I believe we need some kind of standard amount of overdrive.
Obviously we want to push the applications into using per-stream
volumes, but this only really works if they all use the same range.

What is the best way to do this? Should we just decide on it now and
then push this out to the apps? Should we have a constant? e.g.
PA_VOLUME_OVERDRIVE == +3dB or something?

In VLC the 400% relates to a +6dB overdrive so a +3dB for them is 200%
(and one of their devs said to me that he didn't think that anything
over +3dB should be shown to the user). Perhaps even this is too far?

So I want to ask what the plan is here and whether or not I can start to
make some headway on fixing things up.

Cheers

Col


-- 

Colin Guthrie
gmane(at)colin.guthr.ie
http://colin.guthr.ie/

Day Job:
  Tribalogic Limited [http://www.tribalogic.net/]
Open Source:
  Mandriva Linux Contributor [http://www.mandriva.com/]
  PulseAudio Hacker [http://www.pulseaudio.org/]
  Trac Hacker [http://trac.edgewall.org/]