ok first off let me say (and it very well may be the source of my problem.. ) that i am watching all of my xvids on my TV. The video is fine.. the audio is either really quiet (dialog) or really loud (any type of "action" ..even opening a door is very loud compared to dialog). I know TV speakers arent the best thing in the world. I have a single stereo to RCA splitter running from the speaker out on my soundblaster audigy 2 ZS to the RCA audio inputs on my TV. And these xvids are encoded with AC3.. a lossy codec that from what i understand, is used instead of mp3 because it supports full surround sound (vague). So I was wondering if there is any pieces of software.. or anything at all really that will help me with my AC3 and how 'dynamic' it is. I'm sure I would appreciate AC3 if i had a home theatre 5.1 system.. but i want to do the best i can to just bring my normalized sound out of AC3.. if you get what i mean. Any software, articles, links to other posts would be greatly appreciated. thanks

You've to use something like Dynamic Range Compression. I only know of AC3Filter available as DShow-Filter capable of doing this while watching.

AC3Filter

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_level_compression

edit: grammar

If even a door opening is louder than dialog it may be something else. It could be that your decoding the AC3 into all 5.1 channels, and only routing the left and right channel to your TV. If so, you're missing the center channel, which is where nearly all of the dialog is. Make sure whatever program you're using is decoding the AC3 to regular stereo sound.

i have powerdvd set to 2 channel stereo.. i was also wondering if this was possible for mp3 too. that plugin worked very well thank you for the links. i think developing something like that for mp3 might be a bit harder but i might as well throw the question out there, is there anything related for mp3?

You can use AC3Filter for MP3-Decoding too.