Mailing List Archive: Query about effectiveness of ad skipping

Query about effectiveness of ad skipping

Feb 7, 2006, 6:02 PM

Post #1 of 3 (1256 views)

Hi there

I've got MythTV-0.18.1 under FC4 running well - except for the Ad skipping.

*sometimes* it works - and *sometimes* it doesn't. e.g. I taped some
Sinbad movie for my kids to watch, and for the first half of (watching)
the movie, no ad-skipping occurred, and then suddenly it started
skipping - but knocked off 30-60sec of the movie too! I could use the
"Back" button to skip back to see the bits missed - but it wasn't what I
expected.

This is with a Hauppauge WinTV-PVR (150MCE) card if that makes a
difference (actually, is it the hardware or the software that figures
all this out?).

Is this a black art, or are there "magic settings" I should be using?

Thanks!

Jason

PS: I've only had this operational for 2 weeks and I need more disk
already ;-)

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Re: Query about effectiveness of ad skipping [ In reply to ]

david.zanetti at catalyst

Feb 7, 2006, 6:29 PM

Post #2 of 3 (1204 views)

Permalink

On Wed, 2006-02-08 at 15:02 +1300, Jason Haar wrote:
[ad skipping doesn't always work]
> Is this a black art, or are there "magic settings" I should be using?

It's a black art. Actually, black is an important factor :)

In the US, ad breaks are _very_ distinctive. There's a decent amount of
black-level video either side of the set of commericals. In NZ, we don't
cut ads in that way, it's done frame-accurate so there's rarely more
than one frame of black, if any.

That makes it much much harder to do ad detection here.

I believe that's what Myth does (black-level detection), but I'm sure
someone with more knowledge of the internals will correct me :)

--
David Zanetti <david.zanetti@catalyst.net.nz>
Team Leader, Systems Administration
Catalyst IT Limited
+64-4-8032233 +64-21-402260

Re: Query about effectiveness of ad skipping [ In reply to ]

mythtvnz at hotblack

Feb 7, 2006, 7:36 PM

Post #3 of 3 (1201 views)

Permalink

>On Wed, 2006-02-08 at 15:02 +1300, Jason Haar wrote:
>[ad skipping doesn't always work]
>> Is this a black art, or are there "magic settings" I should be using?
>
>It's a black art. Actually, black is an important factor :)
>
>In the US, ad breaks are _very_ distinctive. There's a decent amount of
>black-level video either side of the set of commericals. In NZ, we don't
>cut ads in that way, it's done frame-accurate so there's rarely more
>than one frame of black, if any.
>
>That makes it much much harder to do ad detection here.
>
>I believe that's what Myth does (black-level detection), but I'm sure
>someone with more knowledge of the internals will correct me :)
>
>--
>David Zanetti <david.zanetti@catalyst.net.nz>
>Team Leader, Systems Administration
>Catalyst IT Limited
>+64-4-8032233 +64-21-402260

I'm don't have more knowledge of the internals, but in the commercial
detection settings there are 3 methods mentioned, Blank Frame being
one of them. There's also Logo Detection and Scene Change.

Personally I've got my machine set up to use all 3 with strict (I
don't know why it's just the setting I tried one day and seems to
work for me). It gets it right on about 80% of all recordings, with
Discovery and History being pretty much spot on.

- Wade

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