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Streaming services' obnoxiously loud ads become illegal on July 1 in California

arstechnica.com

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Re: Streaming services' obnoxiously loud ads become illegal on July 1 in California

#91

Post by topranks »

pkulak wrote: post #21
Calvin02 wrote: post #6

I found this to be an issue on YouTube. It wasn’t necessarily malicious. I often put on a no-talking video in the background while reading and the ad interruptions became really loud. I eventually just ended up subscribing, but this is great to see.

I don’t think YouTube normalizes the audio on their videos. I have no idea why, but that could easily become a quiet video that leads into a -16 LUFS ad that blows your ears out.

Because content creators have a right to produce audio how they want.

If it’s a video of someone speaking in a quiet voice it shouldn’t have to have an average volume level of a new Metallica video. Forcing people to use heavy dynamic range compression to get it there would not be good.

Re: Streaming services' obnoxiously loud ads become illegal on July 1 in California

#92

Post by topranks »

tabbytown wrote: post #44
pkulak wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think YouTube normalizes the audio on their videos. I have no idea why, but that could easily become a quiet video that leads into a -16 LUFS ad that blows your ears out.

Supposedly they'll turn it down if it's mastered louder than -14 LUFS. They won't turn it up if it's quieter. I couldn't find a Youtube source for this but it's mentioned extensively online: https://audio.rswaver.com/blog/youtube-loudness-standards

You “turn it up” by using dynamic range compression. Which is fundamentally altering the work.

It’s right and proper YouTube do not do this to people’s work.

Re: Streaming services' obnoxiously loud ads become illegal on July 1 in California

#93

Post by topranks »

radley wrote: post #37
mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're streaming the audio waveform, you can calculate the peak volume and adjust the gain.

Most streaming audio already share the same peak volume. The problem is compression. You can compress the hell out of audio, make it sound extremely loud, and it will still have the same peak volume as uncompressed audio.

Uh huh.

What people are now talking about here is to normalise the “average volume” (by using compression to increase it, or just lowering the volume to decrease).

The problem is the “average volume” of 30 minutes of video, depending on the content, could be quite low.

So matching the ad to that level might not work. The nightmare response we might get is the average volume of TV/movies will be pushed to the limit in future, removing any dynamic range or impact. To comply with the rules for ads. Sigh.

Re: Streaming services' obnoxiously loud ads become illegal on July 1 in California

#94

Post by topranks »

kstrauser wrote: post #38
radley wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> those factors affect all the audio similarly... Output volumes can be calculated using standard curves... TV broadcasters have had to figure all this out years ago. Sorry, but all of that is obtuse. The fact that some digital audio can be perceived as much louder than others –– yet it's all limited to the same digital range –– proves they aren't similar at all. There is no such thing as a standard curve for compres…

None of this is true. There are standard curves for human hearing frequency response and you can use these to compare sound A’s volume to sound B. And since sound compression is in DCT space, you can calculate those numbers very quickly with something similar to sum(vol(f) * curve(f) for f in encoded_frequencies). I read the article. It specifically talks about server-side ad embedding, i.e. where the service is inse…

You’re way off here.

Conflating DCT-based compression of audio data (like MP3) to dynamic-range compression of an audio signal (as done on an audio compressor during production) shows how little your grasping the problem.

It doesn’t work very well for TV in my opinion. Ads still sound louder as they are mastered differently.

I’ve no skin in this game, and no desire to ever see or hear ads. I just hope we don’t kick off a “loudness war” for TV/Movie audio by mandating the average volume across entire programs has to hit some high level like modern music or ads have.

Re: Streaming services' obnoxiously loud ads become illegal on July 1 in California

#95

Post by topranks »

lacoolj wrote: post #67

I wonder if this means Apple TV will make their show volumes louder finally (aka, standard levels of other apps so I don't need to put my speaker at 39/40 to hear what should be 25/40) Though, I don't even know if Apple TV has an ad-supported plan. This is mainly wishful thinking here :)

Really hope they aren’t forced to do that.

Apple TV one of the few streamers with decent quality audio.

We don’t need a “loudness war” for TV and movie content.

Re: Streaming services' obnoxiously loud ads become illegal on July 1 in California

#96

Post by amiga386 »

topranks wrote: post #90
dpark wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> loudness doesn't have a standard It literally does. Audio players were implementing ReplayGain support 25 years ago. > ad platforms would have to have multiple audio streams limited to the different loudness settings This is trivial to solve. You have a standardized volume and a scale factor for each service. Or you use ReplayGain or similar for the same. > it's not a hard problem in the least No, it’s really not.

Replaygain works reasonably well for modern music, as do the LUFS units. The problem with video content is there can be extended very quiet parts. If you try to bring the “average” volume of an ad to the same “average” volume as the last 30 minutes of a drama it could end up being insanely low. The average level of the drama being low due to long quiet parts. Not always the case but this problem isn’t as simple as it…

The advert is 30s long or thereabouts. Its ReplayGain value would be accurate, if fairly computed.

The streaming service decides where the ad breaks are. For video on demand, which is most streaming, they can precompute the ReplayGain for the 30s of video leading into the ad break.

For live video, the client can compute it.

Either way, the client can then adjust the volume of the ad to account for any difference in perceptual volume.

Re: Streaming services' obnoxiously loud ads become illegal on July 1 in California

#97

Post by kstrauser »

topranks wrote: post #94
kstrauser wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of this is true. There are standard curves for human hearing frequency response and you can use these to compare sound A’s volume to sound B. And since sound compression is in DCT space, you can calculate those numbers very quickly with something similar to sum(vol(f) * curve(f) for f in encoded_frequencies). I read the article. It specifically talks about server-side ad embedding, i.e. where the service is inse…

You’re way off here. Conflating DCT-based compression of audio data (like MP3) to dynamic-range compression of an audio signal (as done on an audio compressor during production) shows how little your grasping the problem. It doesn’t work very well for TV in my opinion. Ads still sound louder as they are mastered differently. I’ve no skin in this game, and no desire to ever see or hear ads. I just hope we don’t kick o…

I’ve built my own synthesizer. It is likely I know much more about this subject than you suspect, even if you wish to misread what I’m talking about.

Given how audio codec compression, eg MP3 files, work it’s easy to efficiently calculate the perceived human ear loudness of a sound. The hard work’s already been done. While of course there are intricacies and edge cases, it’s not impossibly hard to match the volume level of an ad to the volume level of the content immediately preceding it. TV stations already do this, by law.

There’s also a weird undercurrent in this thread conflating audio dynamic compression with loudness. Level compression does not imply loudness. It implies a constant volume, at whatever level the engineer picks. Compress the heck out of ads if you want, then match their starting volume to the preceding volume of the streamed content, and you’re golden.

Re: Streaming services' obnoxiously loud ads become illegal on July 1 in California

#98

Post by anon7000 »

wtallis wrote: post #54
itopaloglu83 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It looks great on the photos I took myself, but I wish there was a way to turn HDR off for certain apps or at least on demand. There are some YouTube videos online that I cannot even watch because they get too bright and saturated.

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 mean it is conceptually related. Half the point of HDR is that the filmmaker can say “I want this bit to be this bright (or dark)” and then it’s that bright when I play it back myself

Re: Streaming services' obnoxiously loud ads become illegal on July 1 in California

#99

Post by wtallis »

anon7000 wrote: post #98
wtallis wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mean it is conceptually related. Half the point of HDR is that the filmmaker can say “I want this bit to be this bright (or dark)” and then it’s that bright when I play it back myself

So you're just repeating the assertion that SDR vs HDR and absolute vs relative brightness aren't orthogonal, but haven't even attempted to explain or construct an argument to justify the assertion.

I think it's quite obvious that you can have a system to represent 17 stops of dynamic range without anchoring brightness to an absolute scale, and that you can have a system to represent 6 stops of dynamic range that is anchored to an absolute brightness scale. The two properties are separable.

The only reason that you can get away with saying "half the point of HDR is that the filmmaker can say I want this bit to be this bright" is because of exactly the conflation I'm criticizing: the "HDR" label as used for marketing was redefined to mean high dynamic range plus a standard representation that encodes absolute brightness.

Re: Streaming services' obnoxiously loud ads become illegal on July 1 in California

#100

Post by knollimar »

kube-system wrote: post #88
knollimar wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They should be at stoplights not on highways

Intersections are the most dangerous parts of highways, it is even more critical to be paying attention there.

Digital sign that only shows the ad on red light then.
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