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Comment by eCa

7 months ago

Not the parent, but with similar view on panned audio. If it's music where it's done on purpose, no problem. But talking with audio in one ear? I'm out. Not sure why exactly, but it's very jarring.

For me, it's one of the worst audio quality issues a video can have.

If you have mpv+yt-dlp set up you can fix this with an audio filter to mix to mono.

    mpv --audio-channels=mono 'urlhere'

Somewhat related, I've used

    --vf=lavfi="hflip"

to fix videos which are annoyingly mirrored to avoid copyright. You could also bind these options to keys in mpv to use on the fly. Some videos will only mirror some parts of their footage.

Another fun one I bind in input.conf

    ctrl+shift+r cycle_values video-rotate "90" "180" "270" "0"

Lets me rotate the video. I sometimes also just open a web image in mpv and rotate it like that to avoid tilting my head.

I also have these binds for unbalanced audio, mainly used with 5.1 audio to sound better on headphones or stereo speakers, and the \ bind one seems to make normal stuff slightly louder also, so sometimes I hit it when I don't wanna turn up my speaker knob for one video.

    \ af         toggle lavfi=[dynaudnorm=f=100]

    | af         toggle lavfi=loudnorm

As someone with minor but noticeable hearing issues, the reason it's so jarring is because our brain's audio processing center depends on both ears for understanding human speech.

If you're deaf in one ear, your ability to hear and understand speech in particular goes down a lot, even if someone is talking on your good side. Put that person in a noisy crowd and it's game over.

  • >> Put that person in a noisy crowd and it's game over.

    That's when you discover you can lip read to a certain degree. There is way more to it than that. Speech is only one of the sets of cues we use when discoursing. Hand gestures, body posture, facial expressions and more are all involved too.

    I'm somewhat deaf in both ears, worse in one and always have been. I have had tinnitus since birth. My deafness does not affect all frequencies equally. Thankfully its mostly the high frequencies that have gone a bit dark and the tinnitus may be largely to blame.

    Anyway, your senses are all linked up and your brain is rather good at making connections to try and make up for deficiencies in some areas by co-opting other bits. I have minor lip reading skills to augment my hearing. I can't help it! I also swivel somewhat to try and deploy my better ear as the situation allows. One must try and maintain decorum and not look too weird 8)

    "If you're deaf in one ear, your ability to hear and understand speech in particular goes down a lot, even if someone is talking on your good side. Put that person in a noisy crowd and it's game over."

    This sounds like personal experience. I don't know how old you are but give it time ...

There's a small YouTube creator who has uploaded videos with the narration hard panned. I told him about it in the comments, he went "hmm that's weird", then uploaded more videos with the same issue.

I don't watch that channel any more.

I totally agree, I will not watch a video with any issues like these.

However, I also hate knowing that I'm hearing mono audio where stereo could be used. 99% of the videos I watch don't have panning issues, so to just turn off ALL stereo seems like such overkill to me...