[mythtv-users] Commercial flagging on a sample basis

[Chris Pinkham]

* On Tue Mar 25, 2008 at 09:46:10AM -0700, Brad DerManouelian wrote:
> My guess is the developer who mostly works on commercial skipping is  
> in the US. :)

Since I wrote most of the non-experimental flagger, yes that is true.
Commercial flagging works so well for me that it isn't worth spending
my time on it much anymore to try to make it work the other 5% of the
time.  I'd rather be working on other features of Myth that I get
more benefit out of.  I've got several video samples from outside
and have added or fixed things in the past, such as the video aspect
detection, but my WAF starts to go down when I spend lots of time on
things that she or I will see little or no benefit from.  People
think that commercial detection is a lot easier than it actually is.
I think the ratio of people who've done any good at it over the years
is probably 1 in 5 or maybe even 1 in 10.  Lots of people have stepped
up and some even submitted patches, but most of them ended up making things
worse and giving up.  Several people have mentioned some kind of white
square popping up in the corner of the video either before or during
a commercial.  This would be fairly easy to look for and detect compared
to some of the other detection that goes on in the flagger, but to my
knowledge, no one has tried looking at that.  Audio detection is doable,
but would require a significant amount more of effort since the current
flagger doesn't even try to handle audio.  

--
Chris