With obnoxiously loud TV ads soon to be
outlawed, Arris has added an audio-normalization
feature to its line of VIPr Transcoder/Re-Encoder
systems.
Congress earlier this
month passed the Commercial
Advertisement
Loudness Mitigation
(CALM) Act, which would
direct the Federal Communications
Commission
to regulate commercial
volume in accordance
with the Advanced Television Systems Committee’s
A/85 recommended practices adopted last November.
The legislation would give cable operators and broadcasters
one year from the law’s adoption to comply.
The Arris VIPr family of encoders — which
provide HD compression, ad splicing and MPEG-
4-to-MPEG-2 t ranscoding capabilities — now
include what the company says is a ready-todeploy
solution for toning down loud ads.
“We have come up with a way to [monitor average audio
levels] more efficiently and faster,” Arris vice president
of engineering for digital video systems Santhana
Chari said.
VIPr’s audio normalization incorporates a patentpending
feature that continuously measures and calculates
a running average of the audio levels in the
video stream. If the audio level of a subsequent advertisement
is significantly higher than the program audio,
the VIPr will adjust
relevant parameters in
the advertisement’s audio
bit stream, instructing the
set-top box to reduce the
audio levels to approximately
the same level as
the program audio.
Suwanee, Ga.-based Arris
acquired key assets of
EGT, including the VIPr
encoder product line, last
year for $6.5 million.
