[mythtv-users] Commercial cuts on SMPTE color bars?

[Gregg Casillo]

I have yet to try MythTV, but I am working on a pretty large video
streaming/archiving project at work that may have use of it. We encode &
archive all of our state legislature's General Assembly including
committee meetings and House/Senate chambers, and one thing I could
really use is the ability to cut out large chunks of SMPTE color bars.
We a couple of direct broadcast signals that we encode from that are
color bars when nothing is actually airing.

For example, we know a meeting is supposed to start at 10:00am, but
policitians are on their own time, so meetings typically start fifteen
minutes or so late. That means, I usually have fifteen minutes of color
bars (no audio tone) preceeding the actual meeting that I have to go
back and trim off. Plus, with our current setup (which uses
RealNetwork's line of software and some Perl scripts I wrote), we have
to tell our encoders when to stop. So we create an event for this
meeting to encode from 10:00am to, say, 2:00pm. Often, the actual
meeting lasts an hour or so, so we have about two and half hours of
color bars on the tail end that we have to go back and trim off.

As I said, we currently use RealProducer to encode stuff to RealVideo
files for archival and streaming playback. But we are building out some
new machines to encode to MPEG-2 files (and transcode to several
formats) using WinTV PVR-250 cards and Linux. Woot!

So my question: can MythTV look for and cut out color bars as it does
for commercials between black frames?

Thanks,
Gregg Casillo
Kentucky Educational Television
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