How to reduce reduce dynamic range of a movie as pirated dvds do?

[katherine]

Hi, I downloaded an animated movie and bought the same movie in DVD to compare them. The result is that the pirated dvd has less dynamic range than the original movie and as much as i tried with Audacity or Box4 3 i dont get the same result. Can you help me please?

[davexnet]

I took a look at this, I coudn't get the same balance using a typical compressor. I installed the free VST's RoughRider3, ADHD leveling tool
and VladG Software's Limiter No6 (this is a bit more elaborate; I didn't have time to play with it much) - they work in the latest Audacity.

To be honest I had more luck in Adobe Audition 1.5 on an old XP install - it has a "Compander" - combination expander/compressor.
Got it looking close then used a -gain to bring the whole thing down.

Your second version probably started from a different source, could have been 5.1 compressed to 2.0

[hello_hello]

Try this in an ffmpeg command line:

-af dynaudnorm=f=150:b=1

There's some presets for compression configured in this version of foobar2000:
https://forum.videohelp.com/threads/396860-foobar2000-portable-(for-audio-encoding)

Edit: I just remembered BOX4 can use the Dynamic Audio Normalizer, so maybe you've already tried it.

I didn't have a foobar2000 encoder preset configured to compress and convert to mp3 directly but it's easy to create one.

The four attached mp3s below have been adjusted to roughly the same volume according to an EBU R128 scan (as close to -24 LUFS as possible, adjusting their volumes losslessy). The Dynamic Audio Normalizer version is more compressed, but I just used the settings I'd normally use.

The foobar2000 ffmpeg encoder preset used this command line.

-i - -ignore_length true -af dynaudnorm=f=150:b=1 -c:a libmp3lame -q:a 2 -id3v2_version 3 %d



ffmpeg's EBU R128 compressor (LoudNorm) also seems to work reasonably well. I don't normally use it so I took a guess at some settings.

-i - -ignore_length true -af loudnorm=I=-24.0:LRA=10.0 -c:a libmp3lame -q:a 2 -id3v2_version 3 %d

They actually sound different to what their waveforms suggest, at least to me, but as I'd already looked....

[timtape]

It's often not possible to match them if the compression ratio(s), threshold, attack and release setting used in the pirated version have not been revealed or preserved. The compressed effect is audible, at least to some of us, but the settings used are often not known, so it's hard to reverse engineer the audio with any precision.

At least the original intended dynamic range is intact on the commercial release you mention.
The ideal way might be to compare the two audio files of the same material and extract a difference signal which could be analyzed re the above parameters. That might be a good basis for processing other audio tracks from the same series, but of course there's no guarantee the the same compression settings were used on each episode!