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Afaik Youtube is doing that, not Pulseaudio, and there's nothing that can be done about it.
Seems like you're right. I just noticed that when you right click the video -> Stats for Nerds, there's "volume/normalized" and when it says 83%, pulseaudio will also be 83%.
I guess there might be some way to tell pulseaudio to ignore the volume of the video player
I've never seen this "just" happen, but have seen it during events like switching from headphones to speakers and such.
You may also have your app volumes linked to your master channels, meaning when you lower the sound on your master with something like a key combo, then it lowers the individual app volumes as well, which is generally not something you'd want enabled.
Apps at full, and using PCM/Master channel for general volume is pretty much the "default".
The first thing that came to mind after reading the title was, "uninstall PulseAudio".
Jokes aside, it could be some setting of the DE you are using. If the audio output device is detected as headphones, there tend to be settings that reduce the master volume on certain events.
I remember KDE Plasma used to do that. Every time I switched the output device (or was it when I unplugged and re-plugged it?), it set the headphone volume to 60%.
Im not sure if this is the same thing but i noticed a similar problem in vivaldi but its specific to youtube, or at least it doesnt affect peertube the same way. It seems to be based on the volume of the video, my guess its a "feature" that tries to normalize volume between different videos, but ive never figured out how to disable it.
I had the same idea. Audio normalization is off in the youtube player. Maybe there's another normalization going on in the pipeline
Do you use any pulseaudio modules?
maybe ff syncs the youtube video volume to the pa slider?
It was this for me, but it only works in one direction - when turning it down. So turning down YT volume means turning down system audio, then turning up YT audio is just turning up the YT audio. Insane behaviour. There is a way to turn this off in Firefox flags (about:config). This shit also messes with your system mic volume on MS Teams.
What is the flag for this?
Closest I can find is:
media.peerconnection.enabled
This disables all the WebRTC cancer.
In chrome you can also search for WebRTC but that's the culprit I think.
In addition I'd recommend giving this a read:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1422637
Especially comment 136
Look at the mentioned media scale flag too.
And this other thread:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1515549
Good fucking luck.
Mozilla can't put together a half way functional browser to save their life and lick up every enshittification doohickey that falls of the back of the burning Trainwreck that is Google.
Kinda. If I move the volume slider of the YouTube video player it also moves in pavucontrol automatically. But when I move it to 100% in YouTube it's only 83% in pavucontol
Do you use Discord, by any chance? I remember having this problem when I had audio ducking enabled.
this post was submitted on 14 Dec 2025
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