Normalizing audio and video files

To normalize audio or video files without reencoding video stream, use ffmpeg-normalize script. In Fedora, it is available in the python3-ffmpeg-normalize package.

Usage is very simple:

ffmpeg-normalize a_file.wav a_file.mp4 a_file.mkv

By default, the output stream will be PCM at 192kHz which will usually be a bit overkill. For example, I often record screencast with speech and before uploading to YouTube it’s a good idea to normalize and encode the audio channel into 44.1kHz with AAC at 96kbps:

ffmpeg-normalize -nt ebu -ar 44100 -c:a aac -b:a 96k a_file.mkv