[mythtv] Commercial replacement instead of skipping

[Brad DerManouelian]

On Feb 28, 2007, at 8:03 AM, luitjens at cs.utah.edu wrote:

> Doing it automatically would have problems because the commercial
> flagging is not 100% correct.  In fact for a lot of the shows I record
> commercial flagging is only correct probably around 60% of the time.

Also, take a look at the commflag code. You'll see that part of the  
positive for commercial test includes the length of the commercial  
which you will not know until you've already sat through the  
commercial. The length is an important part of knowing if you've got  
commercial or program content. Essentially, you'll never have a start  
of commercial mark until an end mark exists. That's why the "this is  
the start of a commercial" button was suggested. However, if you need  
to take action during a commercial, you can just as easily take the  
action of jumping to Watch Recordings screen and pick something else  
until the commercial is over.

Perhaps a better way to approach this is to just use OSD messages to  
indicated when commercials are detected. Assuming there is a way to  
speed up the commflag process to make it relatively real-time, simply  
initiating an OSD saying "NFL Football: Commercial break detected".  
That way you could set the option to alert you when commercials are  
found on any recordings that are currently happening. You watch the  
game, a commercial comes on so you exit and watch something else.  
While watching something else a message appears telling you the  
commflagger detected the commercial is over, so at your convenience  
you exit what you're watching and continue watching the game. This  
isn't quite what you're after, but it makes more sense for usability  
and technically feasibility. Again - assuming someone can get the  
commflagger to work reliably much closer to real-time.

All this just so you don't have to wait 10 or 15 minutes after  
something is on before watching it and be subjected to commercials.