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Plex's DVR Can Now Automatically Remove Commercials For You (digitaltrends.com)
Plex has updated its DVR, adding a new feature to automatically remove commercials. According to Digital Trends, "The feature was added in an update the Plex team pushed out over the weekend. You'll need to manually enable the feature by heading into your Plex DVR settings and finding the option, labeled 'Remove Commercials.'" From the report: You may not want to turn the feature on immediately without looking into reports from other users. The description in the settings warns that while the feature will attempt to automatically locate and remove commercials, this could potentially take a long time and cause high CPU usage. If you're running your Plex server on a powerful computer, this may not be an issue, but if you're running it on an old laptop, you might want to hold off. This new feature also changes your DVR recordings permanently, removing commercials from the files themselves. This shouldn't be a problem as long as the feature works as intended, but if it detects wrong portions of the file as commercials, you could end up missing out on part of your favorite shows.
Have gnu, will travel.
Let's argue about it on slashdot.
/s
Cut the cord all the way.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Plex
Iâ(TM)ve been doing this with MythTV for 15 years.
Then the companies creating the boxes decided it was more profitable to sell out the customers to advertisers for a "preferred" fee to push advertisements to them. MythTV does this for free so I'd sooner recommend that as there is no potential conflict of interest.
"Imagination is more important than knowledge" - Einstein
I have not given even one single fuck about any feature added to Plex in the last five years. I want it to handle music metadata properly for non-pop music. That's it. It's not hard. Let me choose to use the Composer, ensemble and soloist tags so I can sort my music properly. They're already on my files. Plex just doesn't do anything with them.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
With old VCRs taping Black and White movies, you could detect a phase shift in the colour burst in the frame and that could be used to stop recording, but it was hit and miss. Another old system was to note an increase in volume (commercials were louder than the show they're being broadcast with).
So, other than needing a lot of CPU cycles, how does Plex do it?
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
I had a VCR which did this in the 90s for taped TV. I'm not sure how it worked, but on playback it would just physically fast forward through the commercials.
Step 1. Wait for excessive audio levels.
Step 2. Block until audio levels return to listenable levels.
The television networks will absolutely lose their minds over this, and sue the pants off Plex for it. As I recall there was quite a bit of negotiating between TiVo and the networks over their DVR, TiVo having to assure the networks that people wouldn't be able to automatically skip commercials (which is why the 30-second skip feature requires a 'cheat code' to turn on; it's off by default), and the capability to prevent fast-forwarding even being built in to TiVo's software.
Tried various incarnations of comskip on and off for years. Best case they unreliably filter out some commercials... worse case the rest of your show is gone.
I remember when ReplayTV first appeared and had this same feature. It was a simpler mechanism, it detected certain audio tweaks that commercials in the US typically use to make them seem louder through a loop hole in regulations. That easily detected audio fingerprint made ReplyTV able to reliably remove the most annoying commercials. Obviously technology progresses in 15+ years but this is not really new technology, more like the industry grew a new pair of balls to take on the legal aspects of advertisement skipping.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
This is pretty much the worst possible way they could have done this.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
BeyondTV scanned recordings and marked the regions that looked like commercials, giving you chapter marks that allowed you to skip them. This was safer than automatically stripping those regions from the files, especially in the early versions where it wasn't as accurate as one might like. But eventually it was practically bulletproof. They never did add automatic commercial region removal, but the ability to script things was in there, and you could write a script that did remove those regions. I never bothered since all you had to do was hit the next chapter button and it instantly skipped over them.
That they would write out a timesheet file for playback and have it tell the player to skip the commercials with out deleting them from the original data file. You know, non-destructive editing.
it is now an illegal stream \restream \copy because it has been edited and pay some more politicians to make it illegal.
> if it detects wrong portions of the file as commercials, you could end up missing out on part of your favorite shows.
Okay so basically "Plex releases a feature that randomly wipes portions of your recordings."
I actually prefer the extreme FF button of the newer Tivos to 30 second skip--you can see what you're missing in case there's something you wanted, and stop or go back. It's the only button with its paint completely worn off the control on my current unit . . .
Then again, most of the time I use the green button and get to the next segment. But some shows don't have that, or it recorded a second showing, or . . . but that's why I noticed that commercial breaks hit 5 minutes last fall, but are back below that this year.
hawk
Isn't this an issue that nearly killed TiVO previously? I hope it doesn't kill Plex! =o
see legal battle in this entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReplayTV
VLC Media player has been doing this for years. Go straight to your favorite TV network webpage. Find the video you want to watch. Use the developer tools of your favorite browser and go to the network section. After the video starts to play, click pause and go to the network section again. Search on m3u8 and find the url that has that in it. Copy that URL into VLC media player network stream. Click play.... Works all the time and there are no commercials.
Cut the cord.