[mythtv] Alternative commercial flagging method

[Andrew Mahone]

On Saturday 24 January 2004 07:35, Liam wrote:
> I've been playing with the commercial flagging routines and have come up
> with a method that works well with the half-dozen british programmes I've
> tried it on. It works in much the same way that the Scene Change +
> Blankframes with different logic for deciding where boundries are. I don't
> see any reason why it shouldn't work with US shows.
>
> Liam

I'm building this now, and I'll try it out over the next week.  I'm glad to 
see somebody working on this, it's been on my gripes list for a while, but I 
spend too much time on filters to have even looked at the problem.  The 
existing detection fails badly on a number of my regular shows, frequently 
missing a start or end of a commercial and marking a large portion of a show 
as a commercial.  I generally just forward through commercials manually 
because of this.

Have you considered taking audio into account as well?  I have no idea how 
hard it would be to analyze audio as well as video in the current framework 
for commercial detection, but it might be useful.  In the US, at least, it's 
common for commercials to be broadcast with significantly louder audio than 
regular programming.  Testing for this, and maybe testing spans between black 
frames / scene changes for reasonable "commercial" durations, could possibly 
make detection more accurate.
-- 
  Andrew Mahone
  andrewmahone AT eml DOT cc