[mythtv-users] commercial flagging idea - commercial "fingerprinting"

[Brad Templeton]

Yup, you'll find threads (often including me) about man of these sorts
of features.   The long term version -- aggregating which parts of programs
people watch at normal speed and which they don't -- provides the only
undefeatable commercial detection algorithm, unless you are among the first
to watch a show, but it's a long way off.   Fingerprints based on various
video and audio fingerprinting -- or even easier, on closed caption text when
present -- is a lot easier.    Some of these can actually be applied without
collaboration, in that once you have identified a budweiser commercial by its
closed caption text you can spot it again everywhere.  (Of course not all
commercials have captions.)

A _really_ fancy fingerprinting system could actually fingerprint shows and
notice when the same snippet of video appears in two different shows -- almost
always a commercial, but not always always -- and then cleverly delete the
redundant fragment and point to it. (Something myth can't yet do of course but
may be planned for the future.)  One reason that's interesting is that aside
from spotting repeated commercials and repeated shows, it can also let you
browse the commercials and start learning what they are.  Ie. some people like
to capture the movie trailers.  Though web download is often a better idea there.