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Instagram does something similar - they have random ads in HDR which iOS will display at obnoxious brightness. Just what you want as you scroll by trying to find someone you actually follow.
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Alaska, Hawaii, Maine, and Vermont got this right by simply banning all billboards.
I never understood why we're OK with placing billboards, which by definition try their best to get you to look at them, next to the road, which we're supposed to look at.
Instagram does something similar - they have random ads in HDR which iOS will display at obnoxious brightness. Just what you want as you scroll by trying to find someone you actually follow.
Waiting for California to ban obnoxiously bright electronic billboards next. The meatspace could use some love too.
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My parents used to have the TV on, blaring, all day long. The ads back then were loud too. They liked the "background noise". They'd read with it on, have conversations shouting over it, and so on. Baffled me. I often wondered, why not just plop down a food blender and leave it on? Why pay for cable?!
How did you stop this behavior?
Though, I don't even know if Apple TV has an ad-supported plan. This is mainly wishful thinking here :)
> The groups argued that “many” streaming services were already trying to manage the “loudness of advertisements that come from server-side ad insertion that may be inconsistent with the loudness of the programs,” […]. Server-side ads can have differing volumes due to companies using various encoding pipelines. Boo-freaking-hoo. Cry me a river, poor streaming services without the technical know-how to calculate an ad…
Consider a streaming movie with surround sound with an inserted ad that is in stereo. I'm playing it on a 5.1 home theater system and you are playing it on a stereo phone. Your system is mixing the surround sound down to stereo.
When your device does that it applies attenuation to the program so that if several channels in the 5.1 stream have something loud all at the same time it won't be too loud in the down mix for stereo and clip. When the commercial cuts in your device recognizes it is ordinary stereo and it doesn't need to down mix. It goes straight through without the attenuation that down mixer applies to the program.
Whatever level the commercial is really at relative to the program, it is going to sound loader than that on your system because of that attenuation difference.
On my device it is not attenuating the 5.1 program since it has all the necessary channels. However, if the commercial is at the same level as the program it will actually sound louder on mine. That's because the same total level of sound split among 5 speakers perceptually seems less loud than the same total level coming from stereo speakers.
The streamer can do loudness normalization between the program and the commercial. It can calculate what the perceived human loudness will be at any time in the adjust the levels so that on my device the perceived level of the 5.1 program when it gets to the commercial will match the perceived level of the commercial on stereo.
But for devices that are down mixing to stereo there is still going to be the attenuation the down mixers uses, and that differs from device to device. That limits what can be done server side to get the program and commercial to match.
Some multichannel formats do include metadata for the device telling it how much to attenuate when down mixing to stereo. If all the device supported that it should be possible for the server to fully take care of loudness matching. Otherwise you probably need device side normalization.
Another approach would be to up mix the stereo commercial server side to whatever surround sound format the program is using. Then they could do server side loudness normalization between the program and the commercial without it being messed up by the difference in how stereo devices down mix.
I'm not sure why that is generally not done. LLMs are suggesting several reasons but I have no idea if they are reasonable. I'll leave exploring that to someone else.
Instagram does something similar - they have random ads in HDR which iOS will display at obnoxious brightness. Just what you want as you scroll by trying to find someone you actually follow.
Is there a technical reason why apple doesn’t allow HDR to be selectively turned off? I’m surprised this is still not at least an accessibility option.
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It has always struck me as strange and user-hostile that most of the computing and entertainment world has decided to couple together the transition from SDR to HDR with a conceptually unrelated switch from relative to absolute brightness scales, and to not really make any effort to explain to users what's going on with that.
I think the main issue is devices treating SDR as inherently dim, and then upgrading HDR to extremely bright. I want my SDR white as bright as the brightest HDR white -- or at the very least configurable to that. Then HDR wouldn't be such a flashbang. And I wouldn't be leaving most of my display's capability on the table in daily use -- it's super annoying that my display is capable of more than doubling its brightne…