Oliver Wong <owong@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> Can you explain how it's able to distinguish between commercials and
> non-commercials?
>
MythTV has a commercial skip feature that works about 80 percent of
the time... I'm not really sure what the algorithm is that it uses
to identify the commercials. I don't actually use that feature as
I've written my own version. My PVR is something of a home grown
hybrid using software components from MythTV but also many parts I've
pulled from other sources or written myself. I use a modified version
of mplayer for video playback. I've defined a hot key for skipping
commercials. It generates digital signatures of the video frames as
it skips and will skip any similar frames it encounters in the future.
It means you are exposed to a commercial at most once and then will
never have to see it again. This is not an entirely original concept;
I've seen it discussed on a few forums including the idea of keeping
a public database of commercial signatures that anyone can use,
allowing your PVR to skip commercials even if you've never seen them.
I think potential legal entanglements has kept anyone from
implementing this.
An interesting side benefit of the signature method is it also allows
you to skip non-commercial scenes within your recorded video. Perhaps
you want to skip all that boring dialog and just watch the action
scenes, or keep the kids from seeing the steamy bits. With mplayer
you can set something called EDL marks and have multiple profiles for
a video with different scenes skipped for each one. I've been meaning
to code up a feature for my PVR that does this, but it hasn't been a
high priority so I haven't gotten around to it.
Later,
Thad
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