Volume Normalization

[podonnell]

My understanding is that normalization does not change dynamic range of a track just peak or average volume.  And that normalization in Jellyfin is only done on Music.  My rudimentary coding skills seems to confirm that when I look at the normalization job.

Movie audio is mastered way differently than music and has huge dynamic range comparatively.  When Jellyfin transcodes audio, there is a setting in Dashboard > Playback to apply a gain to the transcoded and, usually, down mixed audio.  I'm not aware of any settings in Jellyfin to compress the audio, but a lot of sound bars and TVs have settings to change dynamic range.  "Night" or "TV" mode will compress the audio so that the dialogue and loud sounds are much closer in volume.

You might be right on about this being intended for music. At least in the Jellyfin Media Player specifically, that section is listed right under Music Quality, and 'track / album' make a lot of sense when I think about music now:

Audio Normalization

Track Gain
Track gain - adjusts the volume of each track so they playback with the same loudness. 
Album gain - adjusts the volume of all the tracks in an album only, keeping the album's dynamic range.

One of the players I use (maybe HPV Shim or my Hisense Jellyfin app) have an 'experimental night mode', but that didn't do too much either.

I think I'll have to check into this more from the TV / device side to see what options I have.