[mythtv-users] Re: commercial skip/flagging - how well does itwork for you?

[John Morris]

On Mon, 11 Aug 2003, Dane Kantner wrote:

> And, going along with that theme... the ratings themselves are sent in the
> stream...  This is how TVs use v-chips to know what the thing showing is
> rated.  I *think* the data is sent for every commercial, as well as for
> every return to the show.... Though, even if thats true theres always
> exceptions I'm sure too. (But anyway, I think that the VBI device is used to
> read this data--so it could be read by myth too?)

Could they be that dumb? (of course!) If they did decide that even if the
TV can't play the show it should still run the commercials they would be
totally giving the game away, making commercial snippage all but trivial
on shows with ratings information.  Not that I can check at the moment
since I'm using a PVR-350 and ivtv doesn't quite have the vbi stuff
working yet.

But yea, myth is already reading the vbi on most of the bttv cards because
it supports closed captions and that comes over the VBI signal.  Don't
know enough of the gory details to know exactly how that gets preserved
and whether the V-Chip line is being saved along with the captions.

In the end I suspect commercial detection is going to be a whole stack of
different tactics, eventually being forced to work around the broadcasters
countermeasures.  For example, I doubt there is a law that says they have
to have even one black frame between show and commercial.  Right now they
do it because neither the producers or the advertisers want their material
messed with by a crossfade.  Get enough folks snipping commercials and
there is going to be a lot less concern for artistic integrity. Look too
hard at audio dynamic range compression and they will start mixing in more
quiet commercials.  Kinda like spam defense when you think about it.

-- 
John M.      http://www.beau.org/~jmorris        This post is 100% M$ Free!
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