[mythtv-users] Commercial Skip

[stephen]

Chris Pinkham wrote:
>>>How about a configurable feature for Commercial flagging that will not 
>>>save any 'supposed' commercials over xx minutes. I have been having good 
>>>luck with commercial flagging lately but there is an occasional 
>>>commercial that is flagged and is over 5 or 6 minutes and is bogus. I 
>>>think most of my commercials are only a few minutes long so ignoring 
>>>ones longer than that would cut out some bad commercial flagging.
>>
>>Along similar lines, I've had a "commercial break" that was 0:00 long.
>>It ended up getting itself into a rather tight loop of skip 0:00
>>(actually went backwards a bit), play, see 0:00 break, skip, repeat.  So
>>another nice add would be a minimum commercial break length.
> 
> 
> The ALL commercial detection method should prevent commercial breaks less
> than 60 seconds (1 minute) and more than 485 seconds (1 minute 5 seonds) long.
> 
> The other detection methods may still have cases where this can occur,
> I haven't spent as much time on them lately.  I made a note to check them
> sometime, but if you're not using the ALL method, you should try it out
> since that is where the majority of detection effort is being put now.

Hi,

I've been using the "All" method since I upgraded to .17, and I still 
occasionally see short false positives (9 or 11 seconds).  I think the 
idea of a user setting for min/max commercial break length would be kind 
of handy.

Also, I see from the setup menu that it uses blank frame, scene change, 
and logo detection (and combinations) to find the breaks.  Are any other 
methods used (and just not listed)?  Specifically, I was thinking of 
volume level -- a lot of channels will ratchet up the volume during a 
commercial break.  If it is possible to get an average volume level for 
the program, detecting big jumps/drops in volume could come in handy 
(along with the other methods currently being used).  Of course, this 
may already be included ...

That being said, the commercial detection in MythTV is very good ... one 
of the [many] reasons I don't like watching regular TV any more!

thanks,
Stephen