For reasons I explain below*, I have no choice for now but to ask about this topic at the best & most well-known audio/video fora, such as here at AfterDawn.
My Principal Question: Are there any 32-bit Windows-compatible software tools (free or otherwise) that can dramatically compress/decrease/reduce the dynamic range of the embedded audio track(s) within video files of the most popular formats (even if only for standard optical DVD sources) without demuxing them first?
My Principle Question Qualifiers:
(1): I am already well aware that there are plenty of software tools that will do this as long the audio track(s) are demuxed first and then remuxed back together later, so I politely ask potential responders not to re-inform me of this already-known fact, at least as the sole or primary content of your reply (but feel free to inform me of very user-friendly and fully automatic Windows-compatible software tools for automatically demuxing, drastically compressing the dynamic range, and then automatically remuxing DVD/BluRay disc folders). I'm also aware that there simply was no such such software tool (at least for Windows) at all as of several years ago, but I'm hoping that the situation has changed now that we're nearing 2012. Thank you in advance for your thoughtful kindness in this regard.
(2): I also ask potential responders to understand that although I own several hardware A/V devices that already include audio dynamic range compression features (such as "Night" modes and so forth), none of them even approach the very considerable degree of dynamic range compression I require for my primary end-purpose.
(3): In my case, the primary and indeed only end-purpose I'm interested in is to play the results as standard DVD or BluRay optical discs on any of my TVs using stand-alone DVD or BluRay DVD players, without interfering with or waking up others no matter what time of day I play them, and without having to keep fidgeting with the volume controls to keep everything uniformly audible yet also within a uniformly small dynamic range (no more than a low one-digit dynamic range max anywhere at all). Any other end-uses are unimportant to me (i.e., I'm not interested in sharing the results online, or playing the results on my computers, or reducing DVD or file sizes, or streaming in any direction, or anything else unrelated to watching DVD/BluRay optical discs on my TVs).
(4): Also, the resulting output file/DVD requires only standard 2-channel stereo audio (i.e., no multi-channel audio of any kind is even desired for this purpose), and I don't need any modern Dolby or DTS audio encoding (although my HDTV/amplifier systems will play them fine). I also don't mind having to downmix any audio to standard 2-channel stereo first, as input to the software tool I'm looking for. Keeping only the same-language closed-captions/subtitles (usually for the hearing impaired) would be very nice, but this is not mandatory.
(5): The software I'm looking for does not need to include any ripping or burning abilities, and only needs to read and write to standard hard disk DVD folders (i.e., VIDEO_TS or AUDIO_TS) and ideally BluRay ISO files or virtual BluRay drives.
I apologize if you find my verbosity annoying, but my hope is that I won't have to keep adding qualifiers in my replies in the typically cyclical question/reply process, since it's very difficult for me to find enough time to ask tech questions online, largely due to odd work-sleep-wake cycles. Thanks for reading through all this!
Friendly regards to all.
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*: Until I can get much better tech support for performing sophisticated proximity & ordered web searches (Google's ABOUT and Yahoo/AltaVista and others' "NEAR" operators are very limited and/or buggy-- only Exalead's advanced web search show any realistic hopes at all as of 2011, but they provide terrible tech support) for searching on this topic, I have no choice for now but to ask about this topic at the well-known audio/video forums.
