Volume is inconsistent and I feel like I've tried everything

[depotman]

I typically watch movies on my TV by connecting an HDMI cord from my computer to my TV. Lately I've been noticing some wildly inconsistent volume peaks ONLY with VLC player. Loud parts bring the volume to about normal level and quiet parts are so quiet I need to turn up my volume on the TV a LOT (giving me a heart attack when the loud parts come in unexpectedly). It's annoying the crap out of me and weirdly enough, it seems like it only does this sometimes, meaning I've played some movies where it does do this and I've played the same movies where it doesn't do this. I've ruled out that I have a bad HDMI cable because windows media player plays these fine (but I hate WMP which is why I'm here).

I have Windows 7 64bit
Sound drivers appear to be up to date.
I've tried uninstalling and reinstalling.
I've tried many suggestions for normalizing the audio in the VLC player sound options, but I'm open to try whatever you got.
Under my Sound properties in the Communications tab the "When windows detects communications activity:" that's already set to "Do nothing."

Any suggestions? I've googled this enough for google adsense to pay me $20 (joking, but I've googled this a lot.).

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

Typically, this is caused by playing a Surround track on Stereo speakers, and without configuring the system correctly so that VLC would detect the problem and downmix automatically. This can also be caused by poorly mixed media.

Without further details, there really is not much to say.