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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."
Another thing they might try is to look at average loudness. It seems like commercials are pumped up a bit from regular shows.
Tom.
.. 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.
...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...
does anyone know if that v-chip signal is present during the commerical? if not, that would make it very easy to detect commericals.
I already pay for a lot of the commercial-free TV I watch: it's called Netflix.
Lost, 4400, Firefly... I've gotten these on DVD from Netflix, and enjoyed watching them all commercial-free, for the flat-rate price I pay to Netflix for monthly membership.
If I didn't have to wait so long for these shows to come out on DVD, then this would be even better.
The TV show makers need to abandon this silly idea of having to broadcast their shows on a weekly basis, and wait for the season to be over before releasing them on DVD. Let's just skip broadcast altogether and go straight to DVD.
We pay for cable tv. So why are there still commercials at all? Same goes for tv-type advertisements that have been showing up in digital movie theaters the past several years.
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. Then, they got greedy and added commercials anyway.
If all my favorite shows were available on iTunes Store, I'd drop my DirecTV subscription entirely. I have to pay more for DirecTV (cable would cost even more....) for that content than I would to buy it via iTunes season passes. And if I just buy the DVDs used a year later, I'd pay half that. Cable TV is false economy unless you're a stay-at-home parent. For almost everyone else, direct purchasing costs less and you don't have to put up with the commercials.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
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.
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,...
One method that could possible be used to detect ads would be to track when the volume doubles.
Watch TV at a comfortable volume, the commercials come up and make your ears ring.
Well, the TV industry would say that your direct payments only cover part of the costs, the rest of which come from advertising.
Perhaps you haven't noticed, but there ARE channels that have no commercials, but you pay more to get them. If anything, this would support the TV industry's arguments. (There's also PBS, but there you also pay through taxes.)
I'm not sure why this concept is so hard to grasp. You need a lot more than "I'm giving Comcast/Cox/Time Warner/whoever money already, isn't that enough?" You need "What I'm giving Comcast/whoever should be enough to cover the costs on their own, and here's why, so why are they also making me deal with ads?"
Of course, the other reply "because we can" is a large part as well, but I'm sick of seeing "I'm already paying for it" whines.
If it was aired on a channel with a "watermark" logo, myth could use that to reduce the spam/advertising rating of the scenes in question. It's also likely it would be cut without blank frames, so this would also lower it's spam rating. Of course, it probably only spoofs one ad at a time, myth looks for a series of rapid scene changes to detect adverts, if it's just one, it's less likely to trigger the commercial detection.
(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)."