[mythtv] Test (crude) patch for commercial skipping

[Chris Pinkham]

> Hi, Chris.  Thanks for working on the code.  When I originally made
> the commit, I thought I'd have a lot more time to work on stuff like
> this, but a 2 month old baby radically changes how much time you
> think you're going to have.

I've been trying to get my wife familiar with MythTV and she's starting
to like it more and more.  One big thing she/I want is some form of
commerial skip other than fast-forward where you have to either wait for
the end and hit the button again to stop or you have sticky keys off and
have to keep hitting ffwd/rev to get right to where the show starts again.

<back-on-topic>

> the commercials.  Each commercial will fade to black as well, so that
> gives a gap between advertisements.  The length of gap varies.

Right now I'm looking for 10 frames, that seems to work ok on the stuff
I've tried it on.  The test shows I was playing with had about 3-4 blank
frames during inter-commercial breaks and 10 or more during
commercial <-> show breaks.

> My other ideas for the code was:
>   o  Run the detector as a background task, and write a cutlist file.
>  This way, you can use the "jump" function to jump from commercial to
> commercial. If it guesses wrong, no harm - just jump to the next
> point.  Manually REW during viewing if needed.

I think this is great as an option, but think the routines need to be
generic enough to be used for both delayed and "live" commercial
detection.  "Live" meaning while I'm watching either LiveTV or watching
a program I just recorded that hasn't had time to go through the background
processing yet.

>   o  See whether the audio amplitude during a fade to black is lower
> than the amplitude of a dark scene within the program.  Classic
> example is on The Simpsons when all you see is floating eyeballs
> during a night or bedroom scene.

Yeah, my patch doesn't even try to deal with audio.

Chris

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** Chris Pinkham                  Linux v2.2.18, Sane v1.0.4, Cajun v3.0-8 **
** cpinkham at bc2va.org                          http://www.bc2va.org/chris/ **
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