[mythtv] PATCH: Commercial detection/skip using blank frames

JC johnmythtv at crombe.com
Wed Feb 26 14:07:16 EST 2003


Couple more thoughts...

1) When skipping a commercial, can we have an on-screen indicator saying how
long it's skipping?  I'd like to see something like, "Skipping 3 minute
commercial" popup for say at least 3 seconds.  Otherwise, we might have
skipped 7 minutes or 17 minutes and we might not know it.  Additionally,
when it screws up and skips when it wasn't supposed to, we'll see that
on-screen and can backup and watch what we missed.  Bottom line is that it
shouldn't be so seamless that we miss parts of the show and don't even know
it.

2) For doing the detection, it seems the fastest algorithm would be to skip
forward in 60 sec chunks until no commercial break was found, then back up
through that last minute to verify if there was a half or quarter minute
commercial in there.  Starting out looking for a commercial in the first
15/30/45 seconds is wasteful as is 75/90/105, etc.

3) Most of our systems sit idle for many hours at a time.  Doing back-end
processing (no matter how slow and thorough) and sending the results to the
"cutlist" database is a great solution for people with lightly owered
machines.  Most of us who bought hardware encoders (like Matrox) did so
because our processors can't do the encode/decode alone.  Moving the
skipping to a lower priority background thread would be perfect for us.
Ideally, we'd see an on-screen indicator in the playback list of shows that
have been "scanned" so that we know that we can watch those commercial-free.

Keep up the great work Chris!

JC




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