Mailing List Archive: Automatically identifying commercials

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There are a few VCRs, and last I checked, at least one PVR (the
Replay 4000 series) that have automatic commerical skipping. VCRs do
it by looking for fade to black and no audio, fast forwarding 3
minutes or so, then backing up to the last fade up and starting to
play. The Replay has something similar, except it maintains a
separate index file for the MPEG2 stream that it's saving so that
when it's time to jump forward three minutes during a time shifted
playback it knows exactly where in the MPEG stream to jump.

These systems work pretty good. In the Replay, since the actual
datastream still exists and hasn't been cut, if the commercial
skipper guesses wrong, you can still manually get to the start of the
program.

Might as well have a big To-Do list to stay busy through the
holidays, right?

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On Thursday 31 October 2002 01:16 am, Robert Kulagowski wrote:
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> There are a few VCRs, and last I checked, at least one PVR (the
> Replay 4000 series) that have automatic commerical skipping. VCRs do
> it by looking for fade to black and no audio, fast forwarding 3
> minutes or so, then backing up to the last fade up and starting to
> play. The Replay has something similar, except it maintains a
> separate index file for the MPEG2 stream that it's saving so that
> when it's time to jump forward three minutes during a time shifted
> playback it knows exactly where in the MPEG stream to jump.
>
> These systems work pretty good. In the Replay, since the actual
> datastream still exists and hasn't been cut, if the commercial
> skipper guesses wrong, you can still manually get to the start of the
> program.
>
> Might as well have a big To-Do list to stay busy through the
> holidays, right?

And doing station logo detection'll help too...

Isaac