[mythtv] Commercial Detection Suggestion

[Adrian Wilkins]

Was highly enthused to see the Summer of Code page! Way to go...

So, how to improve the commflagger.

I see that on the list a method of audio fingerprinting has been
discussed ; in the UK, I can see how this would work well because of
the relatively long silences on some channels, or the characteristic
jingles on some shows.

But before I saw that, I thought about something similar in the "video
fingerprint" vein.

The channels here (UK) have progressed from showing a still card with
a standard background, through a program-specific still card, through
to using video.

My suspicion is that they are gearing up for war in this space (our
"five" channel especially)- I noticed that in particular, the recent
showing of Die Hard not only used the "video card" that is pretty much
standard for five, showing an excerpt from the film with a text
overlay, but rather than the usual blank (or black) frames between the
"card" and the show, they faded the movie straight into the card with
no intervening black - this was very apparent on manual editing. This
could be caught by the "cross-fade" method proposed for the SoC, but I
had an extra idea.

My thought was that if you took a segment between two keyframes and
performed a summary function on it, the "video card" segments would
have identical or similar results facilitating commercial detection.

The second thought is that commercials (in the UK, at least) tend to
be at fairly regular intervals during a show (pretty obvious from
editing, again), and that using this to weight results would improve
accuracy.

Of course, my C++ is virtually non-existent, and I have NO idea about DSP. :-)

Flame on.