[LAD] Replaygain for video?

Hi there, I could use some advise. You may or may not heard of replaygain. It's reasonably widely used in consumer audio, but sometimes I wish it was available for video as well. By this I mean I wish it was available for the audio part of the video. Well, I need a programming project for a university course and this is just one of my ideas that I want to propose to my teacher and prospective teammates. In order to do this I'd like to narrow it down a bit further and especially want to find out whether I have the right idea of how it can be achieved. Scanning/tagging Since replaygain works on whole audio files I think I need to extract the whole audio track from the container. How easily this can be achieved I don't know. After that, the scanning process should work as with any audio file. Afterwards the calculated replaygain values have to be added to the metadata of the file. I have no idea how hard it is to add new metadata fields to video formats. Playback Video players need to be aware of those tags, read the metadata and scale the playback volume accordingly. This is probably not hard per se, but there are many players out there. However, I plan to start with a single player, even with a single file format, and go from there. Question 1: Is there anything better than replaygain that should be used instead? Question 2: Which player would be easiest to hack to add such functionality? Could it be a gstreamer plugin? mplayer? Question 3: How much work would it be? The project should be done in C++ if possible, otherwise C. Group size 2-4 Students, all rather new at C/C++ and rather inexperienced in general. Other ideas I have are in short: - A CLI (using readline) connection manager for jack audio/midi and alsa midi that can handle large numbers of ports. More detailed ideas exist thanks to Julien Claasen. - A simple but hopefully sane mplayer GUI - A new GUI for ecasound Another problem I might have is that most students in the course are Windows users, not sure whether I can go solo. Thanks for any advice, regards, Philipp