[mythtv-users] How well does commercial detection work?

[Kevin Kuphal]

Chris Pinkham wrote:

>>I agree, the strict option does help a lot. It's hard to be objective 
>>about it but it seems just about as good as it was when the ALL option 
>>was first introduced. I'm wondering if my picture is confusing it. My 
>>cable box produces light and dark lines that scroll up the picture 
>>constantly. Very subtle, but it might confuse the commercial scanner.
>>
>>Curtis
>>    
>>
>
>Yes, wavy lines or static can play havoc with the detection.  If you
>have a noisy signal, the "blank" frames won't seem blank since they
>may have very dark pixels and a some very light pixels so the code
>won't pick them up.  I tried to work around this one time by assuming
>the frame was blank if only X% was light while the rest was dark,
>but that caused false positives as well like for instance a nighttime
>scene of people driving in a car where most of the frame is dark but
>there are a few light spots.  It's definitely an art but getting
>better over time I believe.
>  
>
Is there a chance that those blank detection values for light and dark 
could be made to be read from the DB and controlled from setup?  I have 
a couple channels that suffer from slightly poorer signal than others 
and the strict detection only really fails me on those poor channels.  
I'd love to see if minor tweaks to the numbers made a difference here 
but I'm not 100% sure where in the code to change them and thought maybe 
that's a place where configuring them in setup would help people get 
better results (which large disclaimers about changing the defaults 
affecting commflag reliability)

Kevin