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Most videos on YouTube are loud enough and I can hear them perfectly well, but some have got the volume down too low even with the YouTube volume slider on max and the PC volume set to maximum too. In theory it must be possible to increase the volume, but does such software actually exist?

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5 Answers 5

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If you have VLC player, you don't have to download the video. Just open VLC → FileOpen Network, paste the YouTube URL and click Open. Doing this will stream the YouTube video through VLC, allowing you to use the VLC audio settings.

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    Does not seem to work for vlc 2.5.1. YouTube automatically change the http to https, this may be the problem.
    – Mando Stam
    Commented Dec 26, 2015 at 13:16
  • On OS X, use ⌘+↑ to increase the volume beyond what the slider allows. I guess a similar combination will work on Linux/Windows. Commented Jan 13, 2016 at 14:44
  • Works on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS on VLC version "3.0.4-1ubuntu0.2". Example video at youtu.be/8Bmcgn2RBGI that had been recorded with very low audio. Unfortunately, I had to download the video (very slowly? why?) using Firefox's Flash Video Downloader 16.2.8 at : addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/flash-video-downloader/…
    – bgoodr
    Commented Dec 2, 2018 at 18:19
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One non-optimal possibility is download the video and then play it in VLC which has the ability to increase the volume up to 800% (using the mousewheel on the volume slider).

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  • BTW, for me it only goes to 200%! I have installed the current version just now.
    – Tomas
    Commented Apr 4, 2013 at 13:17
  • I'm also seeing a max volume of 200% using VLC version 2.1.5 on OS X. Commented Mar 20, 2015 at 20:23
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There is a browser add-on for Google Chrome and Firefox available and actively maintained as of 2019:

Audio Equalizer and Amplifier

Apparently it's not just for YouTube, but that's what I needed something for a few years ago, and that's what I needed again now. This time I found it and it's working for me right now.

It has a pre-amplifier and also a graphic equalizer. I'm only using the amp.

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Presumably flash is accessing you audio at the driver level so the only change you could make would be there i.e. using a driver that lets you route the audio through processing (It might be worth looking into this http://jackaudio.org/ I'm not sure this will do do the job).

Perhaps HTML5s video tag will open up the ability to do this sort of thing with a JavaScript or a browser plug-in

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I use this bookmarklet:

javascript:(()=>{if(!!window.__volumeForced)return;window.__volumeForced=true;let forceVolume=()=>{document.getElementsByTagName('video')[0].volume=1;setTimeout(forceVolume,50);};forceVolume();})();

Apparently, YouTube videos are normalized, so the video volume is not 1.0, it ranges from 0.4 to 0.7 on some videos.

I explained this here

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