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Wednesday, December 20
Why WinDVD is STILL an annoying program

Before I get started I must note in passing the death of Joseph Barbera, legendary animator and half of the incredibly-productive duo Hanna-Barbera (ever watch Scooby Doo? The Flintstones? Wacky Races? Top Cat? The Smurfs? Yeah, that was from their crazy brains). Go take a look at this picture of Hanna and Barbera sitting next to some of their creations, and see how many you can name.

Joseph Barbera was 95.




Ok, so on to the main subject of this post... Why is WinDVD annoying? In a word (and it only takes one):

AGC.

This is something I noticed AGAIN whilst watching the DVD of Da Vinci Code (I watched the entire special features disc because I always like to find out about the background behind big feature films), and once I've started watching a DVD I have to watch all of it - so in went the main feature disc, and off I went. I do love Audrey Tatou though, I've dug her look and her acting skills ever since I first saw Amélie back in 2001 (in French, bien sur).

This is my bugbear with WinDVD, and it's shared by others: a horrible 'pumping' effect whenever a really loud noise appears on the soundtrack during an otherwise-quiet sequence (we're talking sounds such as gunshots, explosions, whipcracks, something smashing...) This is due to WinDVD's overaggressive AGC, which raises the level of quiet passages and quietens loud passages to a uniform level, to 'improve listenability' as such. However, AGC which doesn't look ahead a sufficient amount can introduce 'pumping' (derived from music production, the term literally describes the sound heard when a compressor isn't set up correctly, and it adjust the gain of an incoming signal too aggressively). As AGC is little more than a simplified version of a software compressor, voxing/pumping occurs where a suddenly-loud passage can make the AGC system over-react. The rapid reduction/restoration of the gain produces that characteristic, audible quietening-then-gradually-loudening of the overall sound level, as the AGC usually follows a long 'curve' as the audio ramps back up to its original level after being reduced by sound over the threshold level.

Enough with the geekery, sorry (this is what happens when you're on a Music Tech course, you always end up speaking in geek). Put simply, when you're watching any kind of action film or film with loud, percussive sound effects (or many animé movies, also) this can result in it being almost unlistenable. Whilst a useful feature, provided it's not overly aggressive, AGC is usually nothing more than really, REALLY annoying.

I'm not the only person who thinks this either: check Chizumatic's author's comments, from back in February of this year...

20060211: I just thought of something I wanted to get noted down. My current PC DVD player program of choice is Cyberlink PowerDVD. I used to use Intervideo WinDVD. I just bought a new laptop, and it came with WinDVD installed. I used it for a week and noticed (and then remembered) something about it that I really found annoying: the sound voxes.

"Voxing" is the term for what some speaker phones do. They have automatic gain control (AGC) and try to maintain a constant volume no matter what they're hearing. That means that when no one is speaking then you get a lot of hiss and background noise, and if someone speaks up, suddenly it ramps down really fast, only to fade back up once they stop.

WinDVD does that with the audio of the DVDs it plays, or at least for some of them. It's possible that what I'm hearing is Dolby-encoded sound tracks which aren't being handled correctly by WinDVD. Whatever it is, it is really unpleasant and makes some DVDs almost unwatchable because it so thoroughly butchers the sound playback.

There were other things about it I didn't like, but that one is fatal. I do not recommend WinDVD as a product.


It's sad really, to see what would be an otherwise-great program, quite frankly, ruined by the omission of - at the very least! - a switch to enable or disable the AGC 'feature'. For the love of $deity, if you're going to include a feature in your software which so drastically alters the listening experience for your users, at least include the ability to turn it off if it begins to annoy them! In fact, on that note, the whole audio 'section' of WinDVD needs a makeover, because for some reason if you choose Headphones as the listening environment, all WinDVD gives you is a variety of pseudo-surround listening environments (like Dolby Headphone or TruSurround), and even if you're listening on headphones you have to choose 'Speakers' to get a clean, unprocessed output from your DVD soundtracks.

And so, unfortunately, whilst WinDVD otherwise has a great featureset, the lack of inclusion of a switch for its AGC features and its poorly-designed audio configuration panel continues to remind me why I use PowerDVD and VLC all of the time. In fact, I only really have WinDVD installed as it's a requirement for my DVB receiver (it uses the WinDVD DVD decoder filters to decode the OTA MPEG-2 streams). At least you can turn AGC on and off in PowerDVD.

Nngh... Rant over. But seriously, it's annoying. I'd forgottten that WinDVD (STILL!) does this because I've not used it for a while (and before you ask, I do have the latest version installed - I like to stay up to date with my software even if I only use some of it infrequently). And, as far as I've seen during my hours of searching and researching, I've not found a way, via software or registry, to disable WinDVD's AGC. So, if you're wondering why your James Bond DVDs are almost totally inaudible after every car crash and gunshot, that's why.

Right, that's that diatribe out the way - time to go download the latest Daily Show and have a laugh along with Jon Stewart.



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