lower volume

[genegold]

For a few weeks after a switch back and forth twice of motherboards, VLC 1.0.1 was playing videos and some music at higher volume than Zoom Player 6 or 7RC. Then after some uninstalls/reinstalls of Realtek driver and players, the situation reversed a bit and is as follows:

- ZP7 plays much louder than VLC with AC3 audio
- VLC is a fair amount louder with MPEG audio (MP3)
- MPEG audio and WMA2 are about the same across players

What should I be looking at to even them up, at least with VLC and AC3?

Gigabyte GA-MA790X-UD4P
Athlon 64 X2 7750 Kuma Black Ed.
MSI R4670
XP/SP3
Realtek HD Audio driver (current)

[VLC_help]

With AC3, make sure that you are using stereo output if you only have stereo speakers.

[genegold]

Thanks. The Stereo choice is showing correctly. Before the reinstalls, AC3 and ffdshow icons would show up in the sys tray (notification panel) with VLC and not ZP. Since the reinstalls, it's just the opposite. Their presence seems to correlate with volume level. Where do I get those working correctly? Btw, VLC was the last reinstall and I just accepted its default file associations.

[VLC_help]

FFDshow shouldn't wake up with VLC, because VLC isn't DirectShow player. AC3filter might, if you have forced it to encode all audio to AC3.
http://ac3filter.net/files/images/ac3fi ... review.png

[genegold]

Thanks. I don't really care, just poking around for cause(s) of the substantial volume differences. My AC3 config screen shows the same settings as yours, given that SPDIF now has its own tab, so that doesn't seem to be it. Playing a video with AC3 audio in VLC brings up the a52 codec. They're supposed to be similar, but I wonder if that's causing the difference.

OTOH, I just reconfigured MPEG audio (MP3) in Zoom Player to AC3, and now it's louder than VLC, not that the latter is soft. Before all these installs and reinstalls (former XP system and HDD), I had lots of codec packages and perhaps that took care of this issue automatically. I've avoided installing so much this time.