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How MythTV Detects and Flags Commercials
peterdaly writes "Automatic commercial detection is the "killer app" feature that none of the commercial DVR's dare to include. MythTV's automatic commercial detection does a great job of properly separating commercials from content. Here's how the commercial flagging works."
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Automatic commercial detection is the "killer app" feature that none of the commercial DVR's dare to include.
A sentence that (I think) neatly points up the big problem with the USA's legal system...
Another thing they might try is to look at average loudness. It seems like commercials are pumped up a bit from regular shows.
Tom.
Videoredo edits mpeg files without re-encoding them a la adobe premiere. ( == lightning fast)
It also has extremely sophisticated commercial detection (never failed me), based on blackouts, duration of blackouts, duration between blackouts, percentage of screen changed to black, etc.
http://www.videoredo.com/
"Automatic commercial detection is the "killer app" feature that none of the commercial DVR's dare to include."
Ummm, no.... I'm sure many people here are already aware, but if not - check out Beyond TV (http://www.snapstream.com/). The guys over at Snapstream have been doing automatic commercial detection for a while now, and Beyond TV is in the category of a Commercial DVR. And, I'm pretty sure that other companies have been doing it too. This is nothing new - and hasn't yet been a 'killer app'.
.. is that you'll get people making cleverer or less obvious infomercials.
Does MythTV record the whole show and then just skip commercials while it's playing it back, or does it cut commercials entirely out of the file?
The detection couldn't be 100% accurate.
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
How does MythTV's Commercial Detection work? Surprisingly well. Ever wonder how it does such a good job of identifying commercials?
There are three key indicators that MythTV uses from recorded content to identify commercials.
A blank frame is many times sandwiched in-between the television show and the commercials. The most simple form of detecting commercials is to search for blank frames in the video feed. The problem with this is that it can be very misleading. There can be a blank frame anywhere. Just because there is a blank frame, doesn't mean it's a commercial break. You could easily end up with commercials marked as part of the show and parts of the show marked as commercial.
Scene transitions are another indicator. A scene transition is a cut between one video of something and a video of something else. A simple example would be in a newscast where someone is being interviewed. While the anchor is asking the question, you may see both the anchor and the person being interviewed. When the person being interviewed starts to answer the question, the scene "cuts" to a close-up of the face of the person answering the question. In regards to commercials, there is a scene transition "cut" between each commercial. Each commercial usually is unrelated to the next. The last frame of one commercial would be totally different from the first frame of the next. Looking for patterns in scene transitions is one way to identify commercials. Five groups of 30 second scenes all grouped together may be a good indication of a block of commercials. This method works better than the blank frame method, but also isn't foolproof. There's no reason scene changes in a show might not mimic commercials, and vis-versa.
The third indicator of commercials that MythTV uses I find rather ironic. Bugs, also referred to as DOGS (Digital On-Screen Graphics), or Watermarks. A Bug is that little TV station logo in usually the bottom right corner of your screen during a TV show. I find this ironic because one of the reasons or it being there is to build channel awareness in the world of digital video recorders like MythTV. Since DVR users usually find shows by name rather than by channel, they are less concerned with which station a show is on than are other viewers. MythTV watches for these things. Because the digital watermarks are generally not shown during commercials, identifying one and then watching for it is a good indication of when a commercial break starts or stops. While much more complicated to implement than watching for the blank frame or screen transition, in theory it's probably the most effective in some circumstances. Because in practice they are hard to identify on some stations, the actual implementation can be error prone.
MythTV looks for all three of these identifiers to locate commercials. It breaks each show up into scenes, and then applys a series of score for the scene based on looking at all three factors in relation to one another, especially taking timing and patterns into account. Based on the final score of a scene, it's either (essentially) dropped into the show bucket or the commercial bucket. It's not a black/white type thing. Because of the scoring, there are a whole range of grays in the middle. You end up with scenes that looks "more" like commercials or "more" like show content, and they are then flagged as such.
I've been quite impressed at the quality of the commercial flagger that MythTV has implemented. In my experience, the system does an excellent job.
Commercial flagging is set globally in:
Utilties/Setup -> Setup -> TV Settings-> General
Do you have ideas or talent that can help increase the quality of this great tool? Check out and contribute to the MythTV commercial flagging developers' wiki.
I was going to mention VideoReDo and BTY, but you folks already beat me too it.
There's also GB-PVR.....
Well, it depends on how you set things up. It can be set to remove them, but personally, I just let it mark the commercials. Basically, it puts timestamps in the database for the start and end of a commercial. You can then set myth to automatically skip them during playback, or, as I do, play them, and then I use the remote to skip the commercial. I find myth to be probably around 85% accurate on its detection. Pretty good, but far from perfect.
Small distinction with big consequences.
Reminds me of the character Sol Hadden in Carl Sagan's book "Contact", who made millions from the invention of a box named "AdNix" that would automatically filter commercials from the user's TV signal. (The book also mentions a second product named "PreachNix" that did the same thing for evangelical TV shows - Sagan was outspoken in his criticism for religious extremism).
My old school ReplayTV (i believe a model 5000) also had this feature, along with a bunch of other neat features that let you skip to any point of the recording. I would probably still be using it if it had more than one turner..
In europe, Topfield's DVB PVR's and receivers have become very popular. They allow the user to install his own programs and therefore add to the functionality. Lots of stuff available around the net, googling for "Topfield tap" yields lots of results. The entire toolchain is there for anyone to start developing.
Anyway, as I don't really fancy a full-blown PC to my living room, I'm wondering if someone has either already made a TAP for this purpose, or if the MythTV stuff could be ported to Topfield?
With that definition, Myth TV really isn't a DVR either. It just can be *part* of a DVR. Considering it has about the same abilities.
http://www.mythpvr.com.nyud.net:8090/mythtv/how-co mmercial-flagging-works.html
See the Pictures of the Flood of '08
Don't tv stations, such as CW, UPN, Spike TV depend on commercial content on their channels for money?
If we have technology were we can now officially block off commercial content on TV what will that mean to the TV stations? Won't this make corporations thing "well they gonna block the commercial anyway, so there is no point in buying a timeslot on Techtv since nobody is gonna watch it", will this not make tv stations go bankrupt?
If im wrong please explain.
This is available as an OpenSource project. Http://www.mythtv.org Everything is built in there with instructions on hardware requirements and how to build your own. Old news. Snore. Drew.
...upon thinking about it, I don't know that it's all that far-fetched. Designing a system that can segregate commercials from television with a high degree of accuracy is probably comparable to information compression in the level of information/context comprehension required by the device. I begin to seriously wonder if there might be advances in AI that come out of work like this.
I say this because, ultimately, the difference between commercials and "content" is entirely made up of the information they present. As advertisers and broadcaster get better at removing the "flag" type of marker (blank frames, scene cuts, predictable timing) from commercials, there will be incentive to develop more intelligent ad-blocking mechanisms. Obviously, we're not at that point yet, as the methods described as employed by MythTV are fairly naive flag detection mechanisms - but with growing incentive, the odds of working towards a truly intelligent ad-removal scheme increase.
I think it would be hilarious if the biggest mind-mushing technology of all time (television) turned out, indirectly, to contribute to the rise of alternate, machine, intelligence.
Reality has a conservative bias: it conserves mass, energy, momentum...
I've been fairly impressed with MythTV's commercial detection. It has one drawback though: it doesn't skip those short promos channels throw in right before cutting back to the show (e.g. "Politicians are inept, full story at 10"). It seems to get the rest of the commercials. Of course, this is a little picky, as once I start a show I rarely have to touch the remote again (unlike with a TiVo), but is there any hope of them improving it to catch these? I'm guessing there are no blank frames between it and the show to catch.
In the 80's, one channel here in Canada actually had a flashing cursor in the top of the TV screen. I think this cursor wasn't meant to be seen (since an NTSC "frame" contains a few lines of raster that are meant to be outside the viewing area) but on my TV I could see the bottom of it.
This cursor would start Flashing about 10 seconds before a commercial break. I always thought maybe it was meant for VCRs to detect and cut out commercials. I dunno.
Anyone else have any insight into this? (I obvoiusly didn't RTFA since it's already been borked.
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As a side note, what would it take for slashcode to automagically re-write all story URLs for articles in the Mysterious Future to point to the Coral Cache, so that people browsing them before it hits the frontpage populate the Cache with a copy of the site before it gets knocked offline.
Then once it hits the mainpage, it can either keep the Coral Links, or switch back to normal links, knowing that the Coral version should be available if needed.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
Homeland Security and the CCLA (Concerned Citizens Liking Advertising*) can now reveal the horrible truth:
MythTV is a front for American's sworn enemy, Al-Qaida.
Also, some people who use MythTV have French accents, and many others have eaten French Bread.
Do the right thing. Install a wholesome, American operating system on your MythTV box and run a Advertising Ready (tm)** PVR solution.
It's the patriotic thing to do.
And we'll be watching.
* A product of the National Association of Broadcasters.
** Advertising Ready is a registered trademark of your friends and fellow consumers at AWMC (Americans Welcoming Mind Control) ***
*** A product of [REDACTED BY HOMELAND SECURITY]
bingo. it works very well too. i've been using it for about a month, and it's spot-on at least 90% of the time.
they dance around the issue by using the word "chapter" rather than "commercial", so by reading a list of features you might not realize that it has commercial detection.
Most commercials (there are exceptions, like Apple) are still in SD even during HD programming. I'm sure this won't be the case for too many more years, but for now it's pretty handy.
does anyone know if that v-chip signal is present during the commerical? if not, that would make it very easy to detect commericals.
SageTV has 2 different plugins for commercial detection as well.
Look. Its this simple. The let this out. It will kill the advertising INDUSTRY. I say INDUSTRY in all capitols to hopefully hammer home that advertising is a HUGE piece of the economy now. Cut it out and thousands (if not millions?) loose their jobs. So call the advertisers what you like, they are people like you and me trying to keep their jobs from dissapearing. And you would too, if put in the same place.
I have one at home right now that has "Commercial Advance". It works pretty well.
I'm sure that it's no coincidence that recent models do not include this, and that Replay has been having problems.
-- Andyvan
Why not use volume? I think it would be a good addition. Anyone trying to NOT wake up their significant other, or a small child while watching TV has noticed this. The Volume for the commercials is much louder than that of the shows. I can't tell you how many times the 'kids' have been woken up because I was out of the room when the commercial came on, and it was LOUD.
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
Does this mean we have to hand back the Statue of Liberty and the Louisiana Purchase?
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
I'm surprised the major broadcast networks haven't tried displaying commercials at the bottom and/or top of the screen for the duration of the entire program - be difficult to block that using a DVR; Myth might be able to do block them with some fancy programming though.
I know some stations displa brief pop-up ads, but never seen any that displayed on the screen the entire time of a program.
Ron
Ofcom, the communications regulator, has given companies a green-light to take the unprecedented step of sponsoring entire television channels and radio stations ... The sponsorship of ITV1's Coronation Street by Cadbury is worth £10 million a year [$19 million], indicating any deal to sponsor the whole channel would come in at tens of millions of pounds." - Ofcom says TV channels can be sponsored
Reduce, reuse, cycle
Comcast where I live (Boston, MA) has lately begun offering a targeted advertising service - "Spotlight" - which detects and overwrites network and affiliate commercials with their own (usually very cheaply done) local commercials. You'll get part of a network commercial, then some guy selling couches in the next town, then the tail end of another network commercial.
So, I'm sure they're compensating the networks for the commercials they're overwriting, right? I mean, with network commercial time costing in the gigabuck$ and all. And when we viewers do the same thing, we're stealing the networks' life blood...
I'm going to need a little more convincing.
How MythTV Skips Commercials
Last time I investigated the situation, commercials dont put out a v-chip signal, so they would be able to be blocked like that.
"I think an etch-a-sketch with an ethernet port would beat IE7 in web standards compliance."
A close buddy of mine who makes "ripping" software for Tivo, also has a suite of tools that he cannot make public, one of which automatically will remove the trailers and credits of a show, and all commercial breaks.
He wrote this on his own, and said it was pretty easy to figure out if you just watched the mpeg stream (though I've never done it...)
He had a discussion with the guys at Tivo once, and when they discovered that he had this feature, they told him NOT to make it public, and that if he did, "bad things" (involving lawyers) would happen.
So he kept the tools for his own personal use.
--Ray
http://www.beanleafpress.com
>>Does MythTV record the whole show and then just skip commercials while it's playing it back, or >>does it cut commercials entirely out of the file? neither. it *tries* to recognize where they are (no, it's not 100% accurate, and far from it last itme i tried) and marks the points where they are. you can then choose to use these points to skip whatever's inbetween them, or to later transcode the file - either to just remove the stuff inbetween the marked points but leave the rest of the file alone, or to compress the original recording and use it outside of mythtv. personally i just edit the stuff myself...
Replay was pretty good - mine now sits in a closet too mostly due to the lack of a second tuner and the awful picture I got compressing the already compressed SAT signal. You'll note that they were nearly sued out of existance due to this "feature" and that the later models produced by the new owners did *not* have this feature. A real shame too since it was so easy to get shows off for archival purposes. It can be done on a TIVO but not so easily and I've never seen an auto skip for a TIVO :-(
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
Yes they have, with code taken from MythTV.
We clamor for better content in movies and TV shows, along with other entertainment. Why not push for better advertising content quality? Yes, when I record something on my MythTV box, I skip the ads. It's a godsend - especially when you want to watch the latest Real World/Road Rules challenge and you don't want to spend 30 minutes watching the 6 minutes of content. Even better is the torrents of CSI - HD recordings with the commercials already cut. Sweet! But I watch a lot of real-time TV, too.
Back to my original point....among all the trash out there is always a few gems, commercials that get it right, that are funny, unique, etc., that people actually talk about. It's not limited to just Superbowl ads, either. The beer manufacturers can do it, why can't everyone else? Maybe we'd be more inclined to not skip ads if we had a reason to watch them? I think everyone is just tired of watching the same ad spot, over and over and over, for weeks at a time. Why not shoot for a memorable ad instead of repeatedly bashing you over the head with the same crappy one?
It is A killer app, because the ReplayTV had/still has it, and that is what killed ReplayTV via a loss of revenue defending themselves in court. While my original Series 5000 is still in daily use (with auto commerical skip, thank you very much) and my tivo friends envy this feature, you can't buy this product anymore.
I was waiting for a reason to go to mythTV and Commerical Skip will absolutly get me to try it out. I can't afford to watch commericals anymore or press a damn button 5 times, but I doubt it'll swing anyone with a tivo to it. it's still not as easy as buying a box with a monthly subscription.
The TV shows are just as big of an advertisement as the commercials. TV shows are ads to get you to watch the commercials. When the content providers (Timewarner, Comcast, Cox...) finally offer a la carte pricing and people pay for what they want, you will see a major shift in the quality of the shows and in the commercials. Just look at HBO. Right now tv shows are made to sell advertising space, but in the future I think tv shows will be made to support themselves based on subscription services.
It's not new to MythTV either. Someone just decided to write about it today.
Another technique that can be used (and was discussed at one point on the Myth mailing lists) is to create a database of the closed captioning text of commercials. The simple approach is to use the existing commercial detection to determine what is a commercial, then create a database from that to auto-detect repeated commericials (even if they lack the blank frames). A more clever approach is to use spam-filtering techniques like baysian filters to determine if a given scene is an ad.
Although it saves me a lot of fast-forwarding when it does work, it is far from perfect. Often times it will only skip part of a large commercial block common during prime-time shows. Even worse is when it skips part of the actual show due to a black frame or corrupted digital signal.
It will kill the advertising INDUSTRY. I say INDUSTRY in all capitols to hopefully hammer home that advertising is a HUGE piece of the economy now.
Sure television commercials are big business, but it's not the only avenue for the advertising industry. In-game ads, in-store displays, product placement in TV shows and movies, roadside billboards, newspaper and magazine ads, and... oh yeah, I heard that the Internet has some advertising in it, I think....
Advertising isn't going away any time soon. It's taking different forms. If the advertisers can find better ways (less invasive, irritating, and without pulling us out of the suspended realities of our favorite TV shows) to draw our attention to their products, then all the better. It's just like how we always bring up that the RIAA/MPAA need to adapt to newer distribution models instead of fighting them. Advertisers need to adapt, too. As it is, there will always be people without DVRs, and there will always be situations where people want to see some types of commercials (e.g., Super Bowl). I'm not worried about the advertising industry.
I am unsure as to the availability of our model anymore, but we have a ReplayTV DVR box and it records commercials and then can skip them or not. Some channels it has more trouble with (e.g. Bravo, which runs West Wing marathons). For people not keen on building their own stuff, or want to give gifts, maybe this is a solution for you.
Ya I think there is a big distinction. Many people will not create their own PVR because they are well technically challenged. Thus companies that make the entire system and call it a DVR (Tivo). Which those companies would have more effects on the general population as a whole and watching commercials then Sanpstream making the software that people have to get around with the hardware and install everything. People take the easy route and pre-built is easier.
hello
Basically, it puts timestamps in the database for the start and end of a commercial. You can then set myth to automatically skip them during playback, or, as I do, play them, and then I use the remote to skip the commercial.
And, of course, you can optionally edit the resulting cutlist, and then use it during the transcoding phase when producing an archival copy (for, say, burning to DVD).
I've used SageTV, which is a commercial PVR, makes commercial skip available thru two different third party plug-ins. I've tried just about every PVR software and Sage is the most stable and easiest to set-up plus the developer support of the plug-ins and other customizations is fantastic.
I want to test this against the old SNL mock commercials, and see if it filters them out. That'd be hilarious.
/.ed at time of post - so I disclaim responsibility for stealing an idea already presented in the article, if that's the case.
Actually, I think the best commercial remover at any point would simply look to see if a particular 30+ second sequence repeats itself. If so, it's probably a commercial (most commercials run multiple times throughout a show). This would also work nicely to not cut out superbowl commercials, which have far more value - as they aren't usually repeated.
Article is
You can get 15 minutes of fame, but you can go down in history for infamy.
If they can get it to detect the network bug in the lower-right corner, how hard would it be to remove it? Most of the bugs are tranlucent, so you can use some sort of filter to remove it and reconstruct the missing bits based on extrapolations. While more complicated, using motion between frames, you could often get a nearly perfect bug removal.
As the technology like this improves, expect more and more product placements. I don't blame anyone, who wants to skip the commercials. But I don't blame the creators of entertainment for wanting to get paid either.
We refuse to watch the commercials, that would sponsor them. And we refuse to pay them directly by sharing their works with everyone, who can connect to our computer.
Can't do anything about product placements, so the phenomenon is here to stay and grow.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
I hate commercials so much I stopped watching TV 20 years ago. This being saud, I thought the main way to detect commercial was a special signal as part of the final and/or initial lines of the frame, those that don't display on the screen and that are used for various purposes (subtitle for the deaf, show start and stop info, etc). I read somewhere that this signal was used by substations to sometimes broadcast localized commercials instead of the default ones. Of course that's all just hearsay.
Another method I may suggest, is to simply look at the volume level. In the country I currently live in, the volume of commercials is heaps louders than the show you are watching, leading for a jump on the remote each time a commercial break comes up. It may be worth adding to the list in case a heuristic is needed.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
future adverts will blend seemlessly into movies. Could create a whole new art form. We will find ourselves watching CGI'd actors in our known movie doing something completely wierd.... ;-) ...then the film would jump back to where it was.
- like in Alien maybe - when they get into the alien ship they take off there suit helmets and have a drink of something cool and refreshing
could actually be quite entertaining.
especially for things like 'hair products' or 'bathroom accessories'!!!!
hilarious thought - I think I might find it entertaining!
Would seem an easy enough feature to develop as commercials tend to be about 10db (noticeably at least) louder than anything else... at least it's a great marker for the "change channel" or "make coffee" maneuvers, so why shouldn't a box be able to differentiate from that - even if the flags were removed or masked or whatever.
If you take that definition of a "DVR", then that leaves out the very subject of the article out as well: MythTV is also a software solution. There may be third party integrators that sell complete solutions based on either of these sofware though, not sure.
Even Tivo I think detects commercials. They just won't let you skip them outright, you have to fast forward through them.
The majority of the PVR projects I've seen use a separate program to actually do the commercial detection. For instance, I use SageTV (a commercial product), and while it doesn't have commercial skip built right in, simply adding the commercial skip plugin will use the txt files created by nearly any commercial skip product to skip commercials.
.txt files with the same name of the video file. SageTV then uses these text files (which include time markers of when a commercial starts and stops) to emulate the commercial skipping. The commercials are still recorded, the time markers just tell the software what to skip when playing it back.
The one I use (CommSkip), simply runs in the background and creates
Now, the reason I ask if MythTV actually does the Commercial Skip is because I seem to recall in the directions of CommSkip how to install it into MythTV. This leads me to beleive that Myth isn't actually *doing* the commercial skip, they are utilizing most of the same tools the other PVR software packages are. Perhaps this is an incorrect assumption, but perhaps MythTV is one of the few packages that actually include "a" commercial skip solution with their software, but I don't beleive it is their own (I may be mistaken, so please correct me if I'm wrong).
*** DISCLAIMER: I would read the article if I could (/.ed), so please take that into consideration before retorting with RTFA ***
Maybe that's the solution - block anything that DOESN'T have a v-chip signal.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
Before the days of DVRs, I used VHS to time-shift most of the TV I didn't want to miss. In 1996 (no, that's not a typo), I bought a JVC VCR that included a feature called "Commercial Skip". After a show was finished recording, it would rewind and scan through the entire show, marking commercial breaks. Then, when you watched it later, instead of commercials, you'd see about 20-30 seconds of blue screen as it would fast-forward through them, automatically.
I suppose it's no big mystery why Replay TV was sued into oblivion over the same feature that JVC introduced 5+ years before, but it's frustrating to me that there's SO MUCH we could be doing with our entertainment media that is disallowed not by law, but by the restrictions of the industry. I don't use iTunes or any other online store. But I would pay nearly the full price of a CD for a non-DRM'ed, good quality copy. What I LONG for as a consumer is a fully legal (even if it is the price of the iTunes store) version of AllOfMP3.com. I want to pick my quality, I want to download over the net, and I want *NO* DRM. And yes, I'm willing to pay for that, and price is a secondary concern (for me) to those things.
The media industries aren't stupid. They know that the main reason for thier existence is DISTRIBUTION. Especially the recording and television industries. Well, distribution costs over the last decade have fallen to nearly zero, with the arrival of p2p technologies such as BitTorrent, etc. So now, there is little to no reason for them to exist at all. Their seemingly quixotic attack against p2p, etc has much more to do with their own survival in an environment where they are dead weight and completely unnecessary than it does with merely stemming the costs of piracy.
I think that there should be an open commercial ID (maybe a frame with certain properties, like a specific color or shade of grey - it should be very easy to pick out.
If there was one, we (AmericaFree.TV) would use it, and I suspect other Internet television broadcasters would too. Why ? Because in the long run commercials (as opposed to product placements, sponsored events, etc.) will only work if people want to receive them, and because people will just fast forward through them anyway.
My ReplayTV 5000 series unit has it. Works better on some shows than others; I usually just skip-skip-skip-replay.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
I'm surprised not to see any detection method that looks at data stuffed into the Vertical Blank Interval, the 25 lines or so "above" the top of the screen (on CRTs, this gave time for the beam to sweep back from the bottom-right to the top-left of the screen). This includes closed-caption data (line 21), V-chip flags, and often a time reference that set-top boxes can use to set their clocks.
I haven't really watched TV in a couple years, but when I did, often the show would be captioned but the commercials wouldn't, or the show would use the TEXT1 field... Many advertisers are generally wusses who can't deal with controversy, so I'd imagine a lot of commercials would be rated all-audiences even if played on a 'mature' show (assuming they bother including v-chip data at all). (Actually, a previous poster suggested a method to apply something similar to Bayesian spam filtering using commercials' caption text.)
Even without a Bayesian commercial database, it seems like comparing the use/nonuse of fields here could be used as another method to help differentiate between video segments from different sources.
Caveat Emptor is not a business model.
How MythTV Commercial Flagging Works
How does MythTV's Commercial Detection work? Surprisingly well. Ever wonder how it does such a good job of identifying commercials?
There are three key indicators that MythTV uses from recorded content to identify commercials.
A blank frame is many times sandwiched in-between the television show and the commercials. The most simple form of detecting commercials is to search for blank frames in the video feed. The problem with this is that it can be very misleading. There can be a blank frame anywhere. Just because there is a blank frame, doesn't mean it's a commercial break. You could easily end up with commercials marked as part of the show and parts of the show marked as commercial.
Scene transitions are another indicator. A scene transition is a cut between one video of something and a video of something else. A simple example would be in a newscast where someone is being interviewed. While the anchor is asking the question, you may see both the anchor and the person being interviewed. When the person being interviewed starts to answer the question, the scene "cuts" to a close-up of the face of the person answering the question. In regards to commercials, there is a scene transition "cut" between each commercial. Each commercial usually is unrelated to the next. The last frame of one commercial would be totally different from the first frame of the next. Looking for patterns in scene transitions is one way to identify commercials. Five groups of 30 second scenes all grouped together may be a good indication of a block of commercials. This method works better than the blank frame method, but also isn't foolproof. There's no reason scene changes in a show might not mimic commercials, and vis-versa.
The third indicator of commercials that MythTV uses I find rather ironic. Bugs, also referred to as DOGS (Digital On-Screen Graphics), or Watermarks. A Bug is that little TV station logo in usually the bottom right corner of your screen during a TV show. I find this ironic because one of the reasons or it being there is to build channel awareness in the world of digital video recorders like MythTV. Since DVR users usually find shows by name rather than by channel, they are less concerned with which station a show is on than are other viewers. MythTV watches for these things. Because the digital watermarks are generally not shown during commercials, identifying one and then watching for it is a good indication of when a commercial break starts or stops. While much more complicated to implement than watching for the blank frame or screen transition, in theory it's probably the most effective in some circumstances. Because in practice they are hard to identify on some stations, the actual implementation can be error prone.
MythTV looks for all three of these identifiers to locate commercials. It breaks each show up into scenes, and then applys a series of score for the scene based on looking at all three factors in relation to one another, especially taking timing and patterns into account. Based on the final score of a scene, it's either (essentially) dropped into the show bucket or the commercial bucket. It's not a black/white type thing. Because of the scoring, there are a whole range of grays in the middle. You end up with scenes that looks "more" like commercials or "more" like show content, and they are then flagged as such.
I've been quite impressed at the quality of the commercial flagger that MythTV has implemented. In my experience, the system does an excellent job.
Commercial flagging is set globally in:
Utilties/Setup -> Setup -> TV Settings-> General
Beyond TV has done this for years, FWIW...
See U.S. patent #5,699,124 for some details of how the data is encoded.
Some of the same data is encoded in the audio. Here's some info about decoding it.
So far, the PVR community doesn't seem to have figured this stuff out, and the specs aren't easy to get, but the data is out there.
Myself along with many others are looking to buy a set-top media box that:
- is open: can run MythTV,Linux,Vlc,mplayer,... and no reverse engineering is required to use basic hardware (and hopefully mpeg decoders).
- has DVI output
- has S/PDIF out
- is fanless
Basically an open DVD player with DVI out. A DVD player costs $50, but an "open" DVD player costs $1500? $300-$500 would be ok.
Or basically, a fanless mac mini, fanless MiniPC,...
lipsync checks the voices with the mouth opening and closing. It only goes wrong with spagheti westerns. And it goes wrong on Oprah and Dr Phil, as those two never realy close their mouth. Whahahahaha :))
I know you're out there. I can feel you now. I know that you're afraid. You're afraid of us. You're afraid of change.
Its not. My mythbox has incorrectly flagged commercials during numerous programs. It may be version specific, .19, but it seems the entire season of 'Blade:The series' was incorrectly flagged, both early and late around commercials. Cuts out to early for the commercial, and starts late after the show is back from break. Other programs have no issue at all.
I suspect the blanking(blackscreen detection) for that show, due to its genre, may have been incorporated into the regular editing, not intended to mark a commercial flag. Just a theory though.
The article was fairly scant in terms of what algorithm they are using to combine the data derived by using these flags. It said simply "MythTV looks for all three of these identifiers to locate commercials". But how does it combine the indicators? this seems to me the most important part of the process, and its explanation is missing. Each test/indicator provides a piece of presumably meaningful data, but we need some way of combining that data to make a decision. They could simply count flags, they could grow a decision tree, train a neural net, use a clustering algorithm, use a naive bayesian learning system, use a kNN system, use a 1R learner.... Which is it? Anyone know?
Also, another test they should implement: They should look for text in the scenes. On screen text is rare in program content (unless subtitles) but is common in commercials. Several consecutive 30 second scenes, each of which (or most of which) contain on screen text would be a good indicator of a commercial block. If there is lots of text in the entire file, you are probably watching a show with subtitles, so ignore this test. (this test is very computationally expensive because of all the computer vision involved, but there are probably good optimizations and workarounds available, and it would probably be worth it to implement -I suspect it is a dependable test)
I live in Portugal. Here, the tv stations must broadcast a short PUB jingle (always the same one) before and after each pub block. There's however the station self promotion, but usually they don't have the station logo. I think this practice is common here in Europe.
For the record... here, pub blocks sometimes last 20 minutes (10 min is a fair average )... You can see 2 shows in parallel. The viewer is only a cash cow.
Math is beautiful... e^(pi*i)+1=0
And I bet he's invented a 100MPG carb and cold fusion too.
This seems like a great deal of effort and technology to apply to what I have always found to be the perfect time to go to the bathroom, grab a beer from the fridge, or just get my butt off the couch for a few minutes. Assuming I don't want to do any of those things then I simply use the "killer app" which has always been around since the first VCR's: the fast forward button. Two or three minutes of commercials whiz by in under 20 seconds and I am back to my show.
I mute out all commercials and take the opportunity to chat with my wife, kids or whoever else is hanging with me. I still await the day when my right to do this is somehow deleted from the, um, home theater experience.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
Right now there is an advertising exec reading this thread crapping his pants because he just heard about the technology us geeks have been using all along to undermine what he does. Then he happens across this great suggestion for "stickin' it to the girly man" (My phrase, but you can use it cause you'll probably rip it off anyway). It's bad enough shows have to advertise for the network on the bottom of the screen. It started with an innocent little banner, then the banner started moving, now it moves and makes noise and covers up the subtitle/on-screen text (this must affect "Law and Order" fans the most). Now you're suggesting that this continue through the entire broadcast? Son of a bitch! I hate watching 24hour news channels cause I can't focus on the anchor with all of the tickers going, how am i suppose to follow a complicated plot or catch a site gag when i'm staring at the top of the screen at an add for Pepsi.
I would much rather having product placement, but not obvious and cheesy like "Wayne's World" or like in "The Truman Show". Product placement makes for more realistic settings in the show. For example, when a character drinks a beverage, he or she is drinking a Coke or a Pepsi or a Heineken, not a plain can that says "Soda" or "Beer" on it. When was the last time you used "Fabric Softener Brand" fabric softener? This would be perfect for image conscious products like sunglasses, phones and cars. Making sure that the logo is visible is all you need for an effective product placement. Think about how many more Trans-Ams (or was it a Camarro) that Pontiac (or was it Chevy) would have sold had they made it obvious that KnightRider's car was a Pontiac Trans Am (or was it Chevy Camarro).
"It's not whether you win or lose, it's how drunk you get." -- H. J. Simpson
Indeed, the promise of satellite/cable channels was that because you were paying for the subscription to see them, you wouldn't have to see commercials.
And that promise has been met - for channels where the programming and audience justifies it, like HBO. The thing is, when that promise was made, nobody envisioned 200 niche cable channels. There isn't enough subcriber revenue to pay for all those when the audience gets spread around like that, and commercials make up the difference.
You could have commercial-free cable TV, if you were willing to accept that your cable TV lineup consisted of 10 channels total. But that's not what most people want, and the market has adjusted accordingly.
paintball
It sounds like it would be very easy for the networks to degrade the accuracy of the filter by introducing commercial-break-like elements into the regular programming.
I'm sure that Google will love it when you fetch results off their search and then provide it to others after stripping away all the advertisements.
And so will CNN.com and all the other web-sites...
Can't somebody just Tivo this web-site and strip away the tiny ads on top for Thinkgeek, etc?
Then is became 3 ad blocks, then they increased in lengths to 3 minutes. Then 4 blocks 4 minutes in length. Recently I saw an episode of decker wich a popup ad over the show itself for something that blocked over 50% of the screen.
ENOUGH
When I was a kid you saw maybe 4-5 ads in the movie theather and that was BEFORE the time the movie was supposed to start. Then they shifted that to after the time the movie was supposed to start. Then they added in the time before it still ads that seemed to play forever. Then the intermission got ads. Now the ads seem to take 15 minutes or more and are increasinly more boring (whoever banned liquer and tobacco ads should be shot, at least they were fun).
ENOUGH
VHS tapes often had after the main movie preview sections for other movies. That was okay. Then they moved to the start, then with DVD's they became unskippable.
ENOUGH
Banner ads used to be little more then static images at the top or bottom of a website. Then they became animated. Then they got sound. They started to popup and popunder. Became impossible to skip loading before the main page.
ENOUGH
Just plain fucking enough. The simple fact that the rememdy in all cases puts a lot of hassle my way. I don't bother doing something unless it became too annoying. I did not search and install and configure an ad blocker because I was bored. I did it because I had seen one to many fucking ads wreck my browsing.
The TV companies just pushed people to far and now people are taking action and that action could very well ruin the entire model. But that is often the case. It is the straw that broke the camels back. Push to many ads on us and it may break the entire ad system. When people swing back at something the reaction is often to go to an extreme in the other direction.
The TV companies still don't get this and keep forcing more and bigger ads on us. It will only make it worse. The best thing tv companies right now could do is to drastically cut back on the ads. Getting a DVR is still expensive and a hassle. But keep pushing and more and more people will get 100% fed up and just block every damn ad they see.
My ad-blocker gets outofdate from time to time. I don't update it however because it is a hassle. Until I come across a website that just pushed me too far. And then even the "innocent" ads get blocked. I don't block slashdot ads. They are just colatoral damage.
Same with DVR, once you got it you won't block just the over annoying ads, you will use it on every channel. The entire tv industry should regulate itself before they find that nobody is watching any of their ads anymore.
The answer is simple. Nobody is going to bother with ad blocking as long as the inconvenience of the ads is not larger then the inconvenience of blocking them. But once I am going through the inconvenience of blocking ads I might as well block them all.
In other ad industries this effect is well understood and you will for instance see that direct marketting companies at least in holland have regulated themselves. People have the option of just blocking ALL direct mail (a simple sticker) so rather then force people to go through the trouble of using that sticker on the door and ALL go out of business, they regulated themselves before they would destory their own market with too much direct mail crap.
As a sibling said, it depends on settings. I have my mythbox set to flag the commercials, and skip them when it's playing. As the detection is not 100% accurate, I fix any flaws while watching the show, then run mythtranscode to remove them from the file and reduce the size for storage (it doesn't actually reencode the file, it just copies all the frames, skipping parts listed in the cutlist).
Actually, for me the "killer app" would be allowing a myth tv box to replace my comcast hi def dvr. As it stands I wouldnt want to lose hi def just to have automatic commercial skip.
Any device that uses the flags should support recording just the commercials as well. A good example might be during the super bowl when all the rage is the cool commercials that are aired. Some people might want that stuff for their archives...
No. The cable and satellite companies could simply make the money off you like they already do as you pay for your service. They could use some of that money to pay for stations to play. The stations don't need to play ads, they are already being paid by the cable and satellite providers. They just play ads so they can get paid twice.
Just like the "Report Phishing" button at those web browsers.
I agree VideoReDo Plus is excellent. Is there a similiar one for Linux?
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Given the amount of propaganda (both commercial and political) built into current TV shows, sorting out advertisements from commercials themselves rasises issues of definition - and opinion.
Especially during the period before an election.
This bodes ill for applying AI to the CONTENT of the shows and advertisements in an attempt to separate them.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Aside from all the technical issues surrounding commercial skipping, I found the most scary aspect is that some of our elected officials have publicly stated that they believe that a TV viewer is REQUIRED to watch commercials, hence the legal basis for the prohibition of commercial skipping. I believe it was a senator who posited the legal theory that by watching broadcast TV, the viewer is entering into a LEGAL CONTRACT with the channel/station that content can be viewed SO LONG AS the commercials are also viewed. Needless to say, I was incredulous with this notion: How is it that we allow such boneheads to get elected and make our laws ? We are idiots for allowing this thinking to percolate within the Senate!
These people also had delusions of grandeur about developing a TV advert detection and identifying system.
What if a spammer hacks into a network close captioning?
HTML is obsolete. It's time for a new, simpler and richer markup language.
You dont need a 'full blown' PC in your living room...
(well - you do, but you can do it in a way that doesn't have the drawbacks).
You can use a low power/tiny Mobo from Via to build a system. It uses a completely silent external (brick) power supply. Use silent drives, passive cooling... and voila!
My Mythbox is silent, uses about 20W when idle (less than a dim bulb), very small (smaller than my AV Receiver), and did I mention silent?
I've also added external drives than spin down when not in use.
It is long since I read contact. But it is very unlikely of good ol' Carl to say "millions" when he could have easily said, "billions and billions" :-)
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I've noticed that commercials tend to be 10% louder than the show. I wonder if that can be used as a forth indicator?
How's it compare to my Replays? The ReplayTV works pretty well for most things, but some channels and shows make it go nuts. Their algorithm also fails more now that commercial breaks are longer. :-(
Myth also has tools to fix that as well. I always load up the cutlist after I've watched the show (since it has always been accurate enough for me to watch the show and not miss anything). Then I adjust the cutlist to optimize it and do the transcode, which uses the cutlist to chop the files down and compress them to a nice size. I usually come up with somewhere between 200-250 megs for a half hour TV show, which is fine for a decent amount of storage space. And DVD burners are cheap, you could put 18 or so high quality 30 min tv shows on a single DVD.
Perhaps their lack of 'killer app' status is due to the incredible inaccuracy of their SmartSkip algorithm. I've gotten to the point where I don't even use it; instead, I just fast-forward manually...seems a lot easier than hitting the Skip, finding myself at the end of the next commercial break 20 mins later, and having to rewind to find where I was before the bad SmartSkip point.
Stasis is death. Embrace change.
I recently got so annoyed by this that I fired off a nastygram to Comcast. Here's their canned reply.
(I call B.S., of course. If I can do real-time "normalization" with MPC, AC3filter, etc. for free, you're telling me they can't figure it out on their budgets?)
Me: "Why is it that the commercials are about 50% louder than the regular programming content? It's bad enough that I have to pay a monthly bill to get so much advertising content, but it's even worse to have the ads shouted at me..."
Comcast: "This problem is not unique to any one station or company. The phenomenon has a lot to do with the varying sound levels of a television program as compared to the generally consistent sound level of commercials. Broadcasters like Comcast do not turn up the sound of commercials and in fact, we go to great lengths to minimize the sometimes-jarring effect when transitioning from a program to a commercial.
In an attempt to grab viewer's attention in only 15 or 30 seconds, most commercials are produced to be dynamic and exciting. To achieve this they make the sound at a constant maximum level for the duration of the commercial. In sharp contrast, many TV programs have a wider dynamic range or in other words, they can vary from sound passages as quite as a kitten purring to loud music and bombs exploding. If the final scene before a commercial is a quieter, subtler scene, the transition to a commercial can make that commercial seem louder and sometimes even send you diving for the remote control to turn it down.
Most TV program producers attempt to "compress" the program sound to lessen the sound difference between the quite and loud scenes. In addition, Comcast and most broadcasters use sophisticated sound processors to further monitor and "even out" the volume levels. After all, it's in both the producer's and the broadcaster's interest to make the viewer's TV experience an enjoyable one. In spite of these efforts, challenges remain and occasionally the commercials still sound louder. This is particularly true for other stations, whose broadcast schedules consist of movies. Most movies are made for a movie theatre and have a wide dynamic audio range. Films specifically designed for the theatre can have sound passages ranging from quiet whispers to extremely loud passages such as bombs or heavy metal music. This can sound fine in a controlled environment like a movie theatre but when the same film is played on TV, the viewer may find it necessary to raise the volume for the quieter passages and perhaps even turn down the volume on the louder passages.
This problem has been around since the beginning of television and at Comcast we go to great lengths to correct this as much as possible. At Comcast television we are always working hard to improve the viewing experience and we thank you for your comments.Please chat back after the hour if the problem persists for a tech visit."
What you want is irrelevant; what you've chosen is at hand! - Spock, ST VI
Simpsons Did It!
The first reason MythTV commercial flagging works is because you don't talk about MythTV commercial flagging.
The instant something cool and anti-corporate becomes too popular it becomes dangerous to use and/or effectively dies. If MythTV becomes big enough the same will happen to it.
Yes this is an elitist view where only those with the ability to get something are entitled to it. The rest can get what the corporations care to give them.
"I don't know that atheists should be considered citizens, nor should they be considered patriots." George HW Bush
I wonder if the capture cards can detect this signal? I use cheap bttv-based cards, and I would be surprised if they are "aware" of the V-chip. But I like being surprised!
Though I doubt that these problems would be in store for MythTV, any company that implements commercial skip will likely be subject to the same legal action that SonicBLUE (the manufacturer of ReplayTV at the time of the law suit) had to handle.
Guys,
I've got news for you - TV is not necessary for your life. I'm not plugged in to a cable/satellite TV or whatever.. I actually don't watch TV at all. I simply don't have it. What's the point? It just sucks out your time, money, brainwashes you. There are books, sports, even computer games if you're lazy today. There are some good movies - but you don't have to watch them on TV, you could just buy DVD if you suppose some movie worthy. You don't _need_ TV that much.
Use the Mute button, Luke! I set my TV to a normal listening volume, and mute every commercial that comes on. Makes TV much more enjoyable. :)
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
The article is painfully shallow...
"bugs" have been around LONG before DVRs.
"bug" commercial detection is unreliable because A) commercials for the station's own programming commonly use them. B) Networks always have them fading out, and staying off for a couple minutes in the middle of shows. This may be to foil DVRs, but it seems more likely a tactic to prevent burn-in on (old) projection TVs, plasmas, etc.
"Scene change" is interesting, because good scene-change detection is key to good, low bitrate, digital video codecs. So when you encode to something like MPEG-4, you can determine scene change just by reading the file index to locate the keyframes, rather than spending time analysing the video.
Personally, I found MythTV's commercial detection rather iffy, leaving a couple commercials here and there, skipping over 5 minutes of programming here and there, etc. Wrong much too often to be useful.
In addition, MythTV is somewhat clunky, and painfully slow to seek forward/backwards (IMHO). I found that MPlayer (no DVR, just a video player/encoder) made the perfect solution for me. Upon encoding from the TV card with mencoder, it puts keyframes in the perfect places, and seeking is sub-microsecond. At the first sign of a commercial break, I'd hit the 30+sec seek button two or three times, and be exactly at the start of the next segment of the show.
<RANT>
The deal maker for me, though, was really that I didn't have to navigate sub-sub menus to get from TV shows, to files, to DVDs, etc., and learn a different interface for each. DVRs, IMHO, should be just a simple, streamlined filemanager and video player. The colorful bulbous buttons which divide your DVR into different functions don't help, they make things clunky and just serve to artificially slow you down.
</RANT>
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
It is if the margin on that other 20% of viewers' purchases > 1*$xxxx.
Pi Ran Out
Average volume and image intensity.
Commercials are significantly louder than regular tv and the images are usually brighter, especially for cleaning products.
They do this on purpose.
They do the same thing with the trailers they tack on the front of movies in the theatre. So remember don't go asking for the projectionist to turn it down because the trailers are so loud because then you'll have to go ask them to turn it back up once the movie comes on. Unless they've made good use of their cues and set them to adjust the volume down for the trailers and back to normal for the feature.
Wake me up when MythTV doesn't depend on a toy database and starts supporting real databases.
You could go back through your video and say "Yes this is a commercial, no this one isn't," and build a list of known commercials to avoid. Not to mention most programs show the same handful of commercials each break, so the software could use chunks of repeated scenes to identify where the commercials are.
Sounds like the algorithm needs to be smarter and start realizing that commercial breaks haven't gotten that bad yet. The "is commercial" score should start decaying drastically after 3 minutes.
I miss some programs like this, there is also avi splitter to grab something out of an avi (mpeg4 content I think it works best with) without reencoding. Are there any equivlents for linux?
This is what I started using instead of VirtualDub:
http://fixounet.free.fr/avidemux/
I don't know if they do auto commercial detection yet, but there's at least some "next black frame", "previous black frame" buttons that make manual commercial deletion easy.
I also seem to remember that they can't split without encoding unless the parts you're cutting out correspond to keyframes; if you try to cut a segment that ends on a random non-keyframe, it'll have to do a tiny bit of reencoding to turn the first non-cut image into a new keyframe and to encode the following few images up until the next old keyframe.
(1) bug-blocking. ie: get rid of the channel identifier. It's annoying and gratuitous. Most of them are semi-transparent. There ought to be some way to xor them away.
(2) pop-up blocking. Those annoying animations that some networks are starting to put up on the bottom or right side of the screen right in the middle of a show, that are not related to the show.
(3) auto unsquish. When the network squishes the credits to the left 1/3 of the screen to put in some talking head telling you what's next. I want to squish the talking head.
(4) kill the talking head's overdubbed voice.
I know. I'm dreaming. Usual complaint applies: "I already pay through the nose for this. Stop making me get TV the way _I_ want it (from the torrent channel)."
Because in the long run commercials (as opposed to product placements, sponsored events, etc.) will only work if people want to receive them,
I don't want to receive bills every month, and yet they keep coming. Use the service; pay the fee. Why is this concept so hard?
and because people will just fast forward through them anyway.
I see nothing wrong with fast-forwarding through commercials. OTOH, I see PLENTY wrong with skipping them entirely. The former is a compromise between the needs of the advertiser (maximal exposure) and the needs of the consumer (minimal aggravation); the latter is no different than stealing music or movies. That's right, kiddies: STEALING.
Despite what certain sanctimonious tightwads on this site want us to believe, network television is PAID FOR largely by the commercials. Your cable/satellite bill pays for the medium, not the content. The advertisers need to have reasonable assurance that their ads will be seen, or they will pull their funding. No funding; no programs.
When fast-forwarding, the viewer still sees the commercials (in fact, one must actually pay attention or risk missing the resumption of the show), but can mitigate the aggravation of commercials that are either over-exposed, or downright irritating. Similarly, they can go back to watch commercials they want to see again (hey, it happens).
But when skipping, that mind-share is completely lost. The viewer has no idea what commercials aired, and probably doesn't care. How is the network supposed to justify this to an advertiser? Why would any advertiser spend money on a spot they know NO-ONE will see?
We're already reaping the rewards of this "I want it free" attitude. Why do you think that companies have started the carpet-bombing approach to commercials? I remember when it was rare to see the same commercial repeated in a given night; now the same damn commercial airs every five-to-ten minutes. This is a direct response to people trying to avoid them. Advertisers now assume that viewers will actually see maybe one airing in ten, and super-saturate accordingly.
Here's an idea: if you really want to skip commercials completely, send a check to the network for the amount of revenue you cost them. I'm curious how long it would be before commercials seem like a decent compromise.
TFA only lists two out of the three methods.
My wife and I just watched seasons 1 & 2 of Veronica Mars on DVD via Netflix. We'd never heard of let alone seen it because, frankly, who the hell actually watched UPN? We both had it recommended to us on Netflix, were intrigued and added it to our queue at the same time.
We got hooked, loved it, and sucked it all it over the summer. We couldn't wait for season 3 to start on, what is it, CW? So we sit down on opening night and it sucked! The pacing was all off, we couldn't rewind it to hear that line we missed because the baby decided she wasn't ready sleep after all, and we had to sit through terrible ads aimed at people 10-15 years younger than us. We're sitting this season out and will put it in our queue next spring when the DVD comes out.
The troubling thing about this is that we are die-hard fans of this show and rave about it to everyone whenever TV comes up, but we could be part of what will kill this show. We aren't watching ads and we aren't buying the DVDs, so I don't think we exist to the producers of Veronica Mars. If a majority start watching TV like we do, I afraid of the shake-out period during which TV shows suck because the producers can't figure out how to make money in this new world.
obviously no deficiencies vs. no obvious deficiencies
...who didn't see the first indicator of a commercial listed in the article? Maybe it got flagged as a commercial.
If you can read this sig, you're too close.
create a finger print of each spotted commercial (first few frames) and share it across the Internet... beats everything
\u262D = \u5350
Commercials always use different audio mastering techniques to 'sound louder' - should be simple enough to detect this - just look at the wave forms and you'll see what I mean.
the big problem with the USA's legal system...
Death penalty?
If your comment refers to the fear of including such a feature (and I suspect it does), I'm not sure that's correct either. The law has always run on fear. The fear of being caught and paying the consequences. I'm also not sure that the DVR manufacturers are afraid to include ad-skipping for legal reasons. Perhaps they recognise the need for commercials to support free-to-air commercial TV? Perhaps, despite the success of Myth-TV, they are worried about false positives generating dissatisfaction among the public? Perhaps it's simply that the added processing power and memory needed (read: more expensive devices) was the straw that broke the proverbial camel's back?
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
Mod the parent down, and somebody with some presence in the MythTV dev crew bring this idea to their attention. The last thing we want is the content providers "catching on" to such a great idea.
It may or may not be very effective for sporting events, though....
A community-oriented lyrics site
I use smartskip all the time. I have had it occasionally miss a commercial. But, I have never had it do anything like that. But, like you say, I have heard people having troubles with it. It makes me wonder how big a difference there is between the different cable/sat providers in their timings and such. Is it possible that it works great with some systems, and horribly with others?