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

Brad Templeton brad+myth at templetons.com
Tue Apr 12 22:28:39 UTC 2005


On Tue, Apr 12, 2005 at 04:12:31PM -0400, Colin Smillie wrote:
> On Apr 12, 2005 1:06 PM, Ramon Redondo <malinon at gmail.com> wrote:
> > If you read elsewhere in this thread (although not in the many lines
> > you quoted in your short reply), commercial breaks can easily be
> > longer or shorter on different affiliates of the same network.
> > 
> > Here's a relevant quote from Meatwad:
> > > In a perfect world, all of the commercial breaks would all happen at the
> > > same time. Everywhere.
> > 
> > > In reality, they do not. Every master cable headend follows a local
> > > origination commercial insertion schedule sent daily by their traffic
> > > and billing department.
> 
> I think this would probably still give you enough to create a cut-list
> that you could share.  You'd have the show, the time it aired and the
> cable feed ( as defined by xmltv ).
> 
> Even if the cutlist was only used as another data point for commflag. 
> This would reduce the effect of cutlist poisoning.


Another cool trick that could be done, of strong benefit to us west-coast
people, is that people with east-coast feeds could upload the results
of their mythcommflags to a server, and other people could download
those.   Now even if the feed is not exactly the same, a smarter version
of mythcommflag could use it as a starting map.   For example, it could
go to the cutpoints and hunt near them for the transitions it is looking
for (logo on/off, blank frame, etc.)   If it doesn't find them anywhere
nearby, it gives up and re-flags the old way.  But if it does find them
it has a new mapping and can let you skip commercials while watching
just a few minutes behind live -- with no CPU costs.  And even if you
watch much later it's a lot less CPU cost.


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