[mythtv-users] commercial flagging

Peter Gavin pgavin at gmail.com
Tue Dec 5 02:07:50 UTC 2006


Hello,

I finally got my MythTV setup working (after weeks of hardware/ivtv
troubleshooting) and it works great.  The only thing I'm really having
a problem with now is commercial flagging.  mythcommflag is giving me
a lot of false positives.  Frequently, the begginning of a show will
be flagged as a commercial.  For instance, The Simpsons starts off
with a 30-second or so sequence with music and everyone racing to get
home (you most certainly know what I mean).  This part almost always
gets flagged, whether its immediately followed by a commercial or not.
 The introductory stand-up sequence at the start of every Seinfeld
episode gets flagged as well.  I've tried using different
flagging-settings, with similar results every time.

I understand how the flagging works, but not well enough to hack on
it.  One thing I thought I'd suggest is that (here in the US, anyways)
pretty much every show starts with a "TV-13" or "TV-MA" or similar
symbol at the top-left (or maybe top-right) of the screen.  It appears
almost always at the beginning of the show, and sometimes after a
commercial break.  I suppose it would be possible for the flagger to
look for this symbol, since the sequence it appears in is almost
definitely *not* a commercial.

Another thing I thought might be interesting to try would be to look
at the colors used to try and find commercials.  This would work
especially well for cartoons, where similar colors are used
throughout, and the commercials will have very different color
schemes.

Thanks,
Pete


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