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."

Comments

Another check

[renfrow]

Another thing they might try is to look at average loudness. It seems like commercials are pumped up a bit from regular shows.

Tom.

Re:Another check

[fred fleenblat]

Might also be interesting to try to flag entry/exit frames from known commercials (with a checksum or fingerprint sort of thing) into a shared database, then just look up the frames. If your show has 2.5 minutes with matches every 30 seconds, that's a commercial break. People can do a P2P vote with their FF button to contribute. Just a thought.

Re:From the summary...

[dgatwood]

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.