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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.
That might be great insight if the article wasn't labeled ad.
Also, MythTV (by default) uses an Edit List, which is a separate piece of data that contains "commercial start" and "commercial end" flags, so when it's playing and it encounters the start, it'll jump to the end (or you can define remote buttons for "Skip to next commercial flag"). If it's been misflagged, you can hit a button and jump back to watch whatever it classified, as it's not removed from the file. This is seriously something that Plex should look into. And also, as per a comment above, there's a user script you can run that will flip the classification for the "Big Game", so you can watch all those great commercials without the pesky sportsball getting in the way.
Commercials actually aren't that much higher volume than the rest of the show, it's that traditionally they've made heavy use of compression (in the audio sense, not the data sense) to make them seem louder. This basically shrinks the difference between the quietest sound and the loudest sound so that it's much more uniform. It's the same trick that was used by record companies during the "Loudness Wars" that ruined so many albums released on CD since the late 90s.
Anyhow, this is fairly easy to detect with analog electronics, and is likely how my parent's VCR did the same thing a long time ago. After recording an episode, it would scan back through the tape, and mark the commercials, then auto-fastforward through them. It worked pretty reliably.
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
The primary method MythTV uses is detecting a solid black frame. Most commercials start/end with black, so this works well most of the time. The problem is all the modern drama shows that are near-black for entire scenes or entirely black as the camera passes a solid object.
The other way that MythTV detects commercials is by the appearance and disappearance of the network "watermark logo" in the lower-right corner of the screen. Ironically, as networks have started adding banners and watermarks to the show itself, this also makes it easier to detect the transition to commercials.
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.
Cut the cord all the way.
I did.
I've been using Plex for quite a while. I use sonarr to grab shows, and radarr for movies (radarr is a fork of sonarr). They scrape torrent and nzb sites for available stuff that I want and feed it them to Transmission or SabNZBd for Plex to import. A nice interface with recently downloaded shows and movies. You can pause what you are watching on TV and unpause on your phone or another TV. It's wonderful.
When they came out with the DVR feature, I grabbed a Hauppague WinTV card and an Antenna to try it out. It didn't work as well as I expected, but it was beta. The LiveTV would be nice for local news etc, but it was very frustrating when a weak signal would result in an error dialog, and you would have to navigate the interface back to the show you are watching. DVR would record 10 to 20 minutes of a show then quit in my experience. Only certain Plex clients are able to view the LiveTV or DVR programs. The Android app can, but not the Kodi plugin.
I hope they get it sorted out so it's a useable experience.
"Have started"?
They've been universal-ish for at least a decade and a half.
And they're called "bugs," not "watermark logos."
And also it's "crawlers," not "banners." They became universal just after 9/11/2001.
I'll get off of your lawn now.
Kid-proof tablet..
Actually they were until the FCC passed a rule in 2011 (effective in 2012) to require commercials to be at the same average volume as the programs around them.
I remember many nights where I would be watching TV getting a baby asleep only to have an ad come on that was blaring at a higher volume and would wake the kid up.
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.