On Tue, 2010-04-13 at 15:10 +0100, Colin Guthrie wrote: > Hi, > > I'm trying to solve a bug where by mplayer is clamping the volume at > 100%. If someone turns up the volume to >100% using e.g. > gnome-volume-control, hitting volume up or down in mplayer will reset it > to 100% again. > > For a quick straw poll: > > g-v-c: 150% > pavucontrol: 100% > kmix & phonon: 100% (I wrote this so only me to blame!) > > vlc: 400% (but does not yet use PA per-application volume control). > mplayer: 100% > > + numerous others. > > > Now I believe we need some kind of standard amount of overdrive. > Obviously we want to push the applications into using per-stream > volumes, but this only really works if they all use the same range. I don't think that's obvious - I'd push them to ditch volume control altogether instead. I believe per-stream volumes cause confusion easily if they are used for anything else than specifically tuning the application volume relative to all other applications. If an application has a volume slider in a convenient place, and it controls the per-application volume, it will often be used in situations where the device volume would be the appropriate thing to adjust. Making the application volume sliders control the device volume isn't good either, because if an application has a volume slider, the natural assumption made by users is that the slider controls only that application's volume. Solution: throw away volume sliders in applications, and promote centralized volume management with volume applets and hardware controls. -- Tanu Kaskinen
