I was browsing youtube a bit earlier, watching some Eddie Izzard clips (yay!), and some of them were very quiet, so I turned up the volume of my speakers. Of course, when I switched to another clip, I suddenly discovered that Eddie was in fact sitting next to me screaming into my ear. I wondered what Senor Izzard had against my eardrums until I realized that it was in fact youtube that was culpable.
Now I recognize that clips are uploaded to youtube from millions of discrete sources, and there’s no way to police them manually, but it got me to thinking: Is there some way to program something that checks the decibel levels so that it won’t output more than a certain level? I know there’s something like this for TV, so I can’t imagine it would be all that difficult. However, since my programming knowledge consisted of one (1) HS class of javascript (scripto del java), I thought I’d turn to the Dope for some answers.
Can this be done, and if so, why wouldn’t youtube have implemented it?