[mythtv-users] How well does commercial detection work?

[Brad Templeton]

On Tue, Mar 29, 2005 at 12:13:44PM -0500, James Armstrong wrote:
> 
> 
> Ian Campbell wrote:
> >On Mon, 2005-03-28 at 10:34 -0800, Brad Templeton wrote:
> >
> >>I suspect a better behaviour when you hit End (Skip to next commercial 
> >>mark)
> >>if there is no next mark (or the next mark is end of program) to not seek
> >>at all, giving a message like the not-flagged message.   The user can
> >>choose to quit watching or hit "D" at that point easily enough.
> >
> >
> >It's also a little annoying when the commercials are incorrectly marked
> >and pressing forward skips some random large value, there is no easy way
> >to go back because where you jumped from wasn't a marked point. So you
> >have to just manually skip back to the correct place
> >
> >Would it be possible to remember a temporary "last jumped from" position
> >so rewinding would jump back there?
> >
> >Or perhaps the interface could refuse to skip breaks longer than X mins?
> >Commercials here are rarely as long as 5 minutes for example. Or put up
> >a prompt "Commercial break is Y (longer than X) mins" and have you press
> >fwd again to really skip that far.
> >
> >Ian.
> >
> 
> One thing that might make a usefull feature is to show the commercial 
> detection marks on the progress bar on the osd when watching previously 
> recorded shows. If it looked just like it does when the commercial list 
> is loaded in the cutlist editor you would get a visual feedback and can 
> usually tell which commercials are bad based on the position and size.
> 

That is a very good idea, though probably a lot more coding than simple mods
to the action of a keystroke.   The long-gap problem is harder because
the skip, as you may know, skips to the next mark, be it Start or End
of commercial break.  Though it does know the difference so could act
differentely in these cases.

One could also display the cutlist in the seek bar, in a similar manner
to the way it is displayed when in edit mode.

But in general, the right thing is to expect the detection algorithms will
fail sometimes, and to design the UI to anticipate the occasional failure
and handle it with grace.

I could probably code up the 'don't terminate by pressing End' feature
but don't have time for the more complex one.