What is the billionaire pocket lining scheme here? There’s no way the politicians that want magical gun scanning in 3d printers and illegal minecraft servers made a sensible decision
To compensate, they’ll be turning it up by twice as much in all other states starting today.
Commercials? Laughing in Jellyfin, ahrr!
I sure as hell did. I’m over here trying to watch something while also being a fuckin DJ.
Back in ye’old days when you paid for a streaming service and you didn’t have a bunch of commercials…
I especially hate this with music streaming services. They tryna blow out my speakers!!
They even figured out a way to get around decibel laws.
Human hearing is most sensitive within a certain range where we disproportionately hear those sounds louder than other frequencies. Advertisers would boost that range up and cut frequencies elsewhere to lower the average energy in the audio wave to be compliant with advertisement decibel ratings. The perceived sound could be multiple times louder than the intended limit.
Compression is the way this happened. Commercials are HEAVILY compressed, and shows aren’t. It’s not volume…it’s compression ratios.
Well yeah it’s squashing the dynamic range but it’s also more than that since they aren’t doing it evenly across the spectrum. They bias up the high gain frequencies for human hearing, and bias down the frequencies that are low perceived gain for human hearing.
Multiband compression is strong stuff, haha.
I did bc I thought it was a really annoying bug for years until I realized they kept it as a feature. American media is over processed like American pig slop I mean food
When you use so much ad blocking that you didnt even realize these things had commercial breaks
That works for Netflix?
I wish a federal law would pass, but we all know that’ll never happen! So, argggghhhhh
The first thing my wife and I did this morning when we woke up was turn on streaming shit and check to see if they actually did this…
We of course live in California and I am happy to report that the first commercial that played was loud as hell. My wife immediately started trying to find the phone numbers so that we could call and complain lol
Your username… and then this story… but not doing anything to just not have ads…
Okay, so I have no idea about streaming services, but commercials on broadcast TV never had the volume increased but the compression.
(I love getting lost in details so apologies if any of this comes off condescending.) Compression works by making the quieter parts louder, without distorting the louder parts.
THINK of a SENTENCE where SOME of the WORDS are LOUD and OTHER words are QUIETER.
compression works by squishing down all the loud parts, then bringing everything back up to full volume, so the previous sentence would become:
THINK OF A SENTENCE WHERE SOME OF THE WORDS ARE LOUD AND OTHER WORDS ARE QUIETER.
Now, the loud parts didn’t become louder. What happened is that the quieter parts got louder. You lose the dynamic, but gain volume. If you think it would just be exhausting, you’re correct - even at low volumes, you can get a sense of ear fatigue when audio is heavily compressed.
Now, if you want to know why movies have quiet parts where you can’t hear shit and loud parts that are way louder, this is called dynamics. Artistically, you very much want this for the same reason you want quiet parts and loud parts in classical music. If everything is constantly loud, the dramatic moments won’t feel as impactful.
“But wait, I don’t enjoy that, I like having my TV at a reasonable volume!” Yup, me too. It’s fucking annoying. Mixing is done often on high quality speakers, loud volume, so you can get every detail. Most home setups dont have that nuance, and most people don’t care. Until execs can actually get proven that they’ll make more money by having consistent compression, you’re shit out of luck. You’ll probably have to get your own compression, either through software or hardware.
Source: used to work in sound engineering.
Thank you for giving the explanation so I didn’t have to (used to work in broadcast TV including sound and station engineer)
I notice the sports betting commercials they engineer the sound to project the voices in loud environments like a bar. Its annoying as hell at home.
This.
Source: i still work in sound engineering. This is all about compression. Commercials are brickwalled to shit.
People want Christopher Nolan films to sound like compressed commercials. 🤭
And Christopher Nolan wants his movies to sound good in theatres, not on TV’s.
I thought you were going to get into lossy audio compression codecs. I don’t see ads but when I do my ears are like “what in the 128 Kbps MP3 is going on here?”
Audio compression is very different than file compression.
Maybe if the file compression is lossless but lossy file compression works by removing audio, no?
Completely different type of compression.
Oh okay let me just believe you with zero explanation.
They do have parameters for TV ads though where they have to be under or in a range of loudness units, which accounts for that compression. I’m not sure if streaming services are bound by those same standards.
I had no idea they were turning up the volume
WHAT? adjusts my hearing aid
Jeez, this has been going on for so long that parodies of these sorts of malicious practices are nearly a decade old. It’s about time. As usual, California has to be the voice of reason.
Think yer link’s broken.
It’s missing the
https://at the beginning of the URL.And somehow that leads it to an internal link. Noted and fix’d
Only a decade? I recall legal action surrounding this shit in the '90s.
That was for tv and also maybe radio? Technically, this is different. Also, I don’t know of any parodies of tv broadcasts with malicious audio ads.
This is literally the same thing. Some small technical details regarding the delivery method are wholly immaterial, and any arguments asserting that it is are fully disingenuous.
we’re literally in the comments of an article indicating that this is legally distinct deafening, and I’m pretty obviously joking about the distinction being time alone
Also, I don’t know of any parodies of tv broadcasts with malicious audio ads.
That’s because no one watches broadcast tv anymore.
I remember them passing such laws and yet commercials on broadcast TV remain loud as fuck
The workaround was that since commercials couldn’t be louder than the loudest part of the show airing, they made the show theme songs super fucking loud.
As usual, California has to be the voice of reason.
Yeah, sometimes California does some brilliant shit like this, but then newsom does some stupid shit.
As a Californian, fuck Newsom.
We do have common sense laws that lead the nation in a lot of areas, but especially automobile safety and pollution. Manufacturers don’t want to make a California specific version of their product, so it becomes the de facto standard for cars in the US.
How did that slavery vote go?
Go cannibalize some oligarchs instead of diving into unproductive pessimism. I’ll provide you an alibi and a palate cleanser
There was a voice of reason in Nazi Germany. They wanted to send them to Madagascar instead of the crematoria.
As someone actively preparing to leave the US, I ask you, how do you engage in productive pessimism?
We plan the dissolution of the United States of America. Do you think we should do it on the internet?
If you want to, sure. But that sounds more than a little overly ambitious.
Aim high, comrade.
I didn’t know any of those services had commercials.
