It looks great on the photos I took myself, but I wish there was a way to turn HDR off for certain apps or at least on demand. There are some YouTube videos online that I cannot even watch because they get too bright and saturated.

Is there a technical reason why apple doesn’t allow HDR to be selectively turned off? I’m surprised this is still not at least an accessibility option.

I blame Apple for that. They've majorly bungled HDR. The worst part is that everyone follows them, so we have a bunch of hardware vendors trying to tie HDR to numbers they can brag about (brightness) while video content producers just want to make dark scenes without banding.

I experience this on Facebook on iOS. Glad I’m not the only one. Super irritating.

The ads sometimes being loud on YouTube usually doesn't bother me (except recently when it was an extra loud woman shouting something like "My husband fucked me all night last night" and proceeded to extol the virtues of the product that I am supposed to believe allowed for that bedroom performance--that was so annoying and it was so different from the ads they normally show me it earned YouTube a week with the ad blocker on [1]).

What I find most bothersome is the timing. On linear TV the ad breaks are planned to fit with the show. On YouTube they can happen at pretty much any time and often step on a dramatic moment or compelling scene and totally break the mood.

With their ability to automatically make transcripts of video, and their AI models, surely they could make something that could look at the transcript ahead of time and figure out places where ads could go that would avoid this problem, couldn't they?

[1] For several months I've started the day with ad blocking off on YouTube. If they annoy me too much it goes on for the rest of the day. I follow these rules. (1) Ads that are relevant to me do not change my annoyance level, or maybe even lower it. (2) If the ad that interrupts what I'm watching is skippable in 5 second or it is non-skippable but not over 6 seconds and is not followed by another ad it does not change my annoyance level. (3) If there is a second ad and it is skippable in 5 seconds or non-skippable but not over 6 seconds and not followed by a third, it will raise my annoyance level, but they can get away with this a small number of times. (4) A 15 second non-skippable ad will raise my annoyance level enough that as soon as I get back to what I was watching I note the time, turn on the ad blocked, hit refresh, and seek back to where I left off if the refresh loses my place. (5) Too many ad breaks will also raise my annoyance level enough to turn the blocker on.

For the first few months this worked great. It was is if their algorithm had figured out what I was doing and adapted. I'd always get 5 second skippable ads, and they would be spread out far enough apart that most days I wouldn't turn ad blocking on. But lately, over the last few weeks, they are doing a lot more non-skippable 6 second ads following by skippable ads or a second 6 second non-skippable ad, and they are more likely to insert way more ad breaks than they used to. They now almost always are in the ad blocker by the middle of the day.

I don’t think YouTube normalizes the audio on their videos. I have no idea why, but that could easily become a quiet video that leads into a -16 LUFS ad that blows your ears out.

I have experienced this while listening to classical concertos and to meditation videos.

You don't need to pay YouTube protection money. Get a different browser.

YouTube is a completely different experience once you pay to turn off the automated ads

Alaska, Hawaii, Maine, and Vermont got this right by simply banning all billboards.

Those need to be banned, the billboard trucks (and boats) need to be banned, and the shockingly bright headlamps need to be banned.

> See, that’s just flat-out lying. What’s this mythical circumstance where playing audio A at the same volume as audio B on one device will magically make A louder than Bon another? Especially when dealing with server-side ad insertion, as the article discusses, where the service has full control of the input files and the output stream?

Consider a streaming movie with surround sound with an inserted ad that is in stereo. I'm playing it on a 5.1 home theater system and you are playing it on a stereo phone. Your system is mixing the surround sound down to stereo.

When your device does that it applies attenuation to the program so that if several channels in the 5.1 stream have something loud all at the same time it won't be too loud in the down mix for stereo and clip. When the commercial cuts in your device recognizes it is ordinary stereo and it doesn't need to down mix. It goes straight through without the attenuation that down mixer applies to the program.

Whatever level the commercial is really at relative to the program, it is going to sound loader than that on your system because of that attenuation difference.

On my device it is not attenuating the 5.1 program since it has all the necessary channels. However, if the commercial is at the same level as the program it will actually sound louder on mine. That's because the same total level of sound split among 5 speakers perceptually seems less loud than the same total level coming from stereo speakers.

The streamer can do loudness normalization between the program and the commercial. It can calculate what the perceived human loudness will be at any time in the adjust the levels so that on my device the perceived level of the 5.1 program when it gets to the commercial will match the perceived level of the commercial on stereo.

But for devices that are down mixing to stereo there is still going to be the attenuation the down mixers uses, and that differs from device to device. That limits what can be done server side to get the program and commercial to match.

Some multichannel formats do include metadata for the device telling it how much to attenuate when down mixing to stereo. If all the device supported that it should be possible for the server to fully take care of loudness matching. Otherwise you probably need device side normalization.

Another approach would be to up mix the stereo commercial server side to whatever surround sound format the program is using. Then they could do server side loudness normalization between the program and the commercial without it being messed up by the difference in how stereo devices down mix.

I'm not sure why that is generally not done. LLMs are suggesting several reasons but I have no idea if they are reasonable. I'll leave exploring that to someone else.

The group includes Netflix, the most technically capable streaming company. It's sad that companies will only go down kicking and screaming even for the mildest of regulations

I think the point is that when you don’t control the ad, it’s a bit tough to normalize its audio. And controlling the ad means bringing ad serving in house, which while possible, is a huge engineering ask.

I guess the solution is to switch to a proper ad insertion company that normalizes to -24 like you’re supposed to, but that’s not cake either. Especially if contracts are signed.

I hate loud ads as well as anyone else and I welcome this resolution but I would not treat the challenges regulation poses as simplisticly as this. There is a lot of research in increasing loudness without increasing decibels, especially for concerts, but it migrated to ads when tv started adding automatic volume controls to normalize across services.

> See, that’s just flat-out lying. What’s this mythical circumstance where playing audio A at the same volume as audio B on one device will magically make A louder than Bon another?

Regarding your second point: as any audio engineer or electronic musician knows, the same exact audio absolutely will sound very different on different speakers, depending on how well they replicate various sounds, what level of gain is being applied, and the volume (which is different from gain, although people confuse the two).

That's even before you get into the fact that many modern devices, like smartphones, will apply their own compression or sound processing before playing the sound, sometimes to compensate for those deficiencies and make them less noticeable, and sometimes to "enhance" the sound.

Loudness/volume (technically different things but let's conflate them here) are also unintuitive because human ears don't have a flat frequency response curve, and some things will be perceived as louder despite being the same volume, or vice versa.

Advertisers actually can (and do) take advantage of this, by using sound engineering to make things feel louder while staying within the desired volume, by targeting the way humans perceive the sound.

This isn't a defense of the advertising/streaming companies here, because it is a solvable problem. But it is true that this is a problem that they need to solve.

Not “instead of” but “in addition to”. Government regulation is not perfect but is the first-best solution to imposing such injunctions, and prima facie is much more effective than social norms or industry self-regulation. That’s a major part of why the industry bodies are objecting to it.

This is the fundamental tension in law making and government in general.

Leaving room for nuance reduces the seeming capriciousness seen in the enforcement of some laws that look heavy-handed when applied strictly, while said underspecification can allow for abuse instead.

As long as people are individuals with their own volition this tension will exist.

This sounds like automatic gain correction, which is an appropriate solution to this problem. The only thing that IG could be doing better is to calculate the gain on the upcoming 1s instead of the previous. And actually, I would say that the correction should be punitive: if the stream volume crosses a certain threshold, a flat -6dB should be applied on top of the calculated correction.

My parents used to have the TV on, blaring, all day long. The ads back then were loud too.

They liked the "background noise". They'd read with it on, have conversations shouting over it, and so on. Baffled me. I often wondered, why not just plop down a food blender and leave it on?

Why pay for cable?!

UBlock in Firefox removes Spotify ads for free.

My YTMusic App is patched with Revanced(/Morphe), Ublock Origin on browser takes care when I'm on Computer.

I also self-host Navidrome in my homeserver.

Idk either. For free music without ads, there's piracy