Options to increase the audio volume on .avi or mpg4 files?

krs

Every once in a while I end up with a .avi or .mp4 file where the audio level is just a bit too low at maximum volume.

Up to now I have been using Streamclip or Visual Hub to re-encode the complete file with a higher audio level. Worked fine except for the last .avi file.
On that file there are two audio tracks, one in Spanish (I think) and the second one in English.
The English audio file is audio track 2 and I can select that on the original, but when I re-encode with a higher audio level, only one audio track gets re-encoded and it's audio track 1, ie Spanish.
neither Streamclip nor Visual Hub lets me select which audio track I want to re-encode and they don't seem to do both which is what I expected.

Any way around that?

Even better - is there not a way to just boost the level of the audio track (re-encode it) and not touch the video? Re-encoding everything seems a waste of time if all one needs is a higher volume.

MACenstein'sMonster

Try this link:

ffmpegX a DVD, SVCD, VCD, CVD, VOB, DivX, XviD, H.264, PSP, iPod, MP4, MOV encoder for Mac OSX

Scroll down the screen to where "Normalize" is highlighted in gray.

I've not used ffmpegX for this purpose but the program has done wonders for solving some of my other file conversion/dvd burning problems (so much so I kicked a donation their way ). Maybe it'll do the trick for you, too.

krs

Thanks for the suggestion.

I downloaded ffmpegX two years ago but never used it because I needed to download three other programs to support it and didn't want to be bothered at the time looking for them and doing that.
Is that still the case today or does everything now come in a nice neat package?

I did notice that one can select specific audio tracks, so that may just do the trick for me.

MACenstein'sMonster

Still the same but easy as 1, 2, 3

krs

I assume you added the for a good reason.

The underlying software seems to be good but the user interface is pretty poor.

So I downloaded all the bits and pieces, that was relatively straight forward except that one additional piece of software had a .intel extension which confused me.
For one thing - I'm still on a PPC Mac, I have also never heard of a ,intel extension.
Turns out that option was dimmed out when I tried to install these bits and pieces.

So I drop my file into ffmpegX, select audio track 2 which is the one I wanted, cranked up the volume to +9 (any idea what units +9 is, I was guessing at db's, doesn't say) and I encoded.

Well, the one thing that struck me is how fast the encoding was, about twice as fast as with Visual Hub or Streamclip.

But when I was done, I ended up with the video but no sound at all.Turns out, I think, that the audio track numbering is inconsistent.
In ffmpegX under Audio, the track numbering starts at "0", in a later option where one can select up to two audio tracks, the numbering starts at 1.
On the original video, the audio track numbering was 1 and 2.
I selected track 2 which was English, but since one of the audio track numbering schemes in ffmpegX was actually 0, 1, 2, 3.....I assume track 2 in ffmpegX was actually track 3 in the original video and that of course didn't exist.

So I just ran the encoding a second time (good thig it's relatively fast, selecting track 1 in ffmpegX (which I hoped would be track 2 in the video, and Eureka - success.
I now ended up with a video which only had one sound track and it was in English.
However, setting the volume to +9 did absolutely nothing!
The volume was still at the original level.
I suppose I can now run the first conversion through Visual Hub to actually increase the volume, but encoding twice doesn't improve the picture quality any.

Separate from this exercise, I'm also trying a different approach - strip the audio into a separate file, boost the level and then recombine the video and audio again.
Problem there will be to get the audio in sync with the video.

I wish there was an application that would just boost the audio level and keep everything else the same.

MACenstein'sMonster

Yep, the "wink" icon was there because it's like the ol' "this will take just a minute" before ultimately spending far more time than you have patience for.

I have PPC too. Install and running ffmpegX wasn't much of a problem but I spent ungodly hours trying to get some subtitles burned into a movie. Trial and error. But I love all the options ffmpegX gives (and the app's cost helps when things go badly). After using it for a few months, more and more I'm finding that the main problem has been me and not the program. Then I appreciate using it even more.

Hopefully with some tinkering it can get the results you want.

EDIT: Have you tried using the support forum? I've used it and at the very least it can help narrow it down for you. Posting the results from the "ffmpegX progress log file" is helpful to those trying to help you (they'll often ask for them).

krs

No - but I will.

The other strange problem is that alongside the window of the video file (when I play it in VLC) I also get a slightly smaller window that is just black.
If I close that black window, the main window also disappears.
Weird - I have never seen that before even with ffmpegX the first time I did an encode.

krs

I checked the ffmpegX support forum and there are actually a few threads that the "boosting the volume" feature does not work.
Someone else then posted that it is an mencoder feature and it only works if you select an mencoder format.
I tried that but boosting the volume still doesn't work on ffmpegX.

Then I googled a bit more and found a later version of streamclip. That version is supposed to allow you to delete an audio track and then of course would only encode the one that's left. That would solve my problem as well, but that feature doesn't work either. But it did say that one of the enhancements of this latest version of streamclip is to encode all audio tracks, so that's what I'm doing now - encoding with streamclip again at the boosted audio level and hopefully this version will encode both audio tracks.

krs

That didn't work either - I ended up with a file with no audio.
First I thought that perhaps VLC couldn't play the audio but when I reload the encoded file into streamclip it also shows there is no audio at all.
No clue how that happened, I just went with the defaults in streamclip, but the latest version.

Man, I never had so many problems with one video file but I also find a lot of other people in the net with the same problem and no straight-forward solution.
None of these three applications let me boost the audio tracks without messing up something else.

MACenstein'sMonster

I'm totally talking outta my #@* here but what if:

(1) Convert the video to DV using VisualHub
(2) Import into iMovie
(3) Increase the volume
(4) Save as
(5) Convert back to the original file format???

I know from working with video in iMovie that you can easily increase the volume, reduce background noise, etc.

Would this not work? Anybody?