Normailize Audio

[elite]

It would be great if there was some way to normailize the audio in a recorded file - This would be esp. useful if intergrated with comskip/clean and would normalize the different parts individually - I find (in the UK at least) that commercials are much louder than the shows/films...

[Shader]

Well... commercials generally aren't 'louder' then normal tv shows.
The only thing is that normal shows normally just occasionally use the 'loudest' volume and that commercials are compressed which mean they are 'normalised' to use the loudest possibly volume as many times as possible. (The dynamic range is shrunk (not widened... i'm from the netherlands and do not know the correct word... :-) sorry)
Normalising the volume of your recordings will not solve your problem...

[elite]

I see what you're saying (compressed and expanded are the words you're looking for)...

I find certain channels broadcast at different levels (why they don't all just peak at 0db I don't know...) so it would save me a couple of taps on the volume buttons once in a while...

As for commercials I guess the only solution would be to apply gentle compression over the entire file (or show parts using if using comskip)... - Obviously I doubt this will happen as the amount gained for the amount of effort wouldn't be that great - plus I have enough difficult tuning comskip let alone getting a natual sounding compression setting

[capone]

Post-processors like ffdshow have some normalizing if you let it handle audio. What may be slick using a transcode function not to reencode to a new format, but maybe just run a normalize on the audio and do a direct-stream copy of the video. That may be pretty fast and make it more like a post-processing service like comskip.