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

David Schmidt david.schmidt.in.dallas at gmail.com
Thu Jan 11 16:17:47 UTC 2007


On 1/11/07, Damian Surr <damian at gingermagic.com> 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.

Welcome!  You're about to have your life drastically changed for the better.

>
>  How does it detect and delete/skip the commercials?

After (or during with the newer near-real-time method) the program
records, a background job looks for things like blank frames,
frequency of scene changes, the little logo in the corner, etc. and
tries to build a list where it thinks commercials are.  If the player
sees such a list, it just seeks right over them.  You'd never even
know they're there.

> Sounds clever. Does it
> work everywhere, or a US thing? (I'm in the UK)

I'm in the US and seeing 99.99% accuracy on good noiseless channels.
2-5% on noisy channels.  Prior posts on this list seem to indicate
it's less effective, but still quite good in other countries.

>  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?

If you turn on near-real-time, you could do it that way (of course at
just 20 minutes, at least in the US, you'd catch up before 2 hr unless
you took a LOT of bathroom breaks (paused)).

Normally, the movie records while you are away or watching something
else, then the commercial flagger runs and it is flagged before you
even start watching it.

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

A few do, but they are a definite minority.  Why watch TV to the
networks' schedule when you can watch it to yours?


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