[mythtv-users] Daddy, what's a commercial

[Brian Wood]

On Jan 11, 2007, at 8:52 AM, Damian Surr wrote:

> I'm intrigued by this feature.
> Currently making a shopping list of things I need to turn my old PC  
> into a MythTV media centre, so I've not actually used Myth yet.
>
> How does it detect and delete/skip the commercials? Sounds clever.  
> Does it work everywhere, or a US thing? (I'm in the UK)

It is by all accounts better than 90% effective in the USA, but folks  
here have said that it is much less reliable in the UK. I have found  
it to be at least 95% reliable, and the errors I have seen are all  
"safe" ones (ie: you wind up seeing a commercial as opposed to  
skipping program material).

It is less reliable in the EU for several reasons I suspect. The rate  
of scene change on EU commercials is not as great as the US ones, EU  
stations do not use the logos as much as the US ones and the EU spots  
tend less to be precise multiples of 30 seconds.

> If you wanted to watch live tv, for example a 2 hour film, would  
> you pause the start and estimate the time of adverts, then start  
> watching advert free 20 minutes later or something?

The commercials have to be "flagged".  You can start the flagging job  
while the program is still recorded. You could, I suppose, watch the  
recording as it was being recorded and flagged as long as you stayed  
enough behind real time, assuming you had enough CPU power to  
playback and flag at the same time. But it's really designed to  
simply watch a recording later after it has been flagged.

> Or don't any of you watch live TV any more?
>

Most of us do not.
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