[mythtv-users] Why has no one implemented subtext commercial filtering?

[Brian Wood]

On Thursday 16 April 2009 12:52:13 jedi wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 16, 2009 at 09:29:11AM -0700, David Brodbeck wrote:
> > I think part of the reason there's not a lot of enthusiasm for this is
> > commercial detection already works very well for most people, at least
> > in the U.S.  For most shows I watch the accuracy is well over 90%.  That
> > makes putting in a lot of work to improve it by a few percentage points
> > not very appealing.
>
>    I would like to chime in with a "me too". Commercial detection already
> works very well in MythTV. With the exception of a few shows that like to
> make "explosive" scene transitions, we can leave skipping on all the time
> and generally don't even have to be aware of these odd things called
> commercials.

Agreed. At least here (USA) commercial detection works pretty well, at least 
on the networks I tend to watch. When it does fail, it tends to fail in the 
mode of showing the commercial block, not by skipping program material, which 
is as it should be.

I really don't think examining the captions would help much, and might confuse 
things. Certainly it would make setting up commercial detection harder, it's 
simple as pie now, and I would not want that to change.

There was an outfit a while back marketing a device that would "bleep" bad 
words, I believe it used the captions somehow. I haven't heard anything about 
it in a long time, I suspect it was a commercial failure, either due to lack 
of demand or unreliable operation, or possibly both.

In many cases when possibly questionable words occur in the program, the 
captions seem to have been "cleaned up" significantly. This was definitely 
the case with a sub-titled version of Das Boot I have, since I could 
understand the German it was very obvious the captions were much "cleaner" 
than the actual dialog. It seems at least some people think of 
hearing-impaired people as immature or stupid, a sad state of affairs to be 
sure.

Captions also tend to lag the dialog in a lot of cases, I'm not sure they 
would reliably indicate commercial breaks even if you could get such a system 
to work. This is especially true with live captioning, like news shows.

But we do not want to discourage folks from posting ideas here, as long as 
they are courteous, and check the archives first.


-- 
beww
beww at beww.org