The State of Automated Commercial Skipping 381
iskqy writes "Even though attention to commerical skipping has gone down since the motion picture studios sued replaytv for it, I've noticed that it appears to be alive and well in some PVR products on the market. ReplayTV PVRs have it (though different from what they got sued for) in what they call Show|Nav (what a terrible feature name!) and SnapStream's Beyond TV has it in a feature they call SmartSkip. In both cases, the user has to press a button to automagically skip a commercial (vs. the original ReplayTV feature which skipped them without any user intervention) but it's basically the same thing. ReplayTV plays down commercial skipping ("jump forward and back between scenes in a show") but SnapStream is more open about the feature ("Skip commercials and other parts of TV shows"). "
MythTV (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I don't get it (Score:3, Informative)
TiVo also has fast-forward, and when you stop fast-fowarding, it jumps backwards a few seconds because it knows you hit the button one second too late.
But I have no idea how the automatic commercial skip of ReplayTV works. I'm pretty sure it is more sophisticated than just skipping ahead 30 seconds. So mod me "+1 informative" and "-1 doesn't know what he's talking about".
Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Informative)
It doesn't use time. The commercials can be any length. It seems to be about 90% effective (with the latest software update, it used to be worse). So while Im watching a show, it almost always skips ahead at the correct time (when the commercial starts) but 10% of the time it will either start about 10 seconds before the commericals end, or 5-10 seconds into the show (in which case, I curse, then use the goback button (whatever its called) that automatically goes back seven (I think) seconds.
Its a neat feature, and it seems like it sometimes works better on some shows than others. For instance, I always had a problem with it working with X-files more than say, Family guy.
Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Informative)
"Technically, the maximum volume is the same for commercials and normal programming. If you watch the audio levels on a VU meter you will see that they peak at around the same level.
The difference is that advertisers make use of various tricks to make the commercials seem louder. Whereas a TV program will have a range of audio levels, commercials do tend to be full-on noisy. Tricks such as compression are also used to maintain constantly "louder" levels and try to attract attention.
So it's mainly a perceptual thing. Although the commercials don't reach a high volume, the way they are made gives the impression that they are louder."
Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Informative)
So by checking the variation in dynamic range of the sound the software is able to guess that some part of the recording is a commercial.
I believe this is the main method used to detect commercials.
What the replay does. (Score:1, Informative)
What it seems to do is look for a frame which is a very dark black - blacker than a normal 'black' in a show. These usually occur at program to commercial transitions. It then skips forward to the start of the next long block without such a super black frame.
Sometimes its a little overzealous and mistakes a very dark shot inside a show as the start of an ad, and sometimes it fails to catch the start of an ad break. I think it tries to exercise some intelligence, since false positives usually occur near the start of ad blocks. It seems to look for groups of black frames.
In case of a false negative, manually hitting 'commercial skip' takes you instantly to the end of the ad block.
Its a *great* feature, and I'm really PO'd that the newer machines don't have it.
I also have a VCR that does this, but it required post-processing on a recorded show to mark the ads. Once this was done (takes about 15 minutes for an hour show) it would automagically FF through the ads.
How it works (Score:3, Informative)
Re:30 second skip vs vcr commercial skip (Score:2, Informative)
For me, it works most of the time. The times it doesn't is typically during shows with a lot of black gaps like 24 and Law & Order.
Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Informative)
Sure it does (from the TiVo Community forums):
While playing a recorded show, press Select, Play, Select, 3, 0, Select. You should hear some kind of beeping confirmation tones at the end. The ->| button will then function as a 30-sec skip instead of it's normal function.
Another feature I didn't know about is you can sort the now playing list:
Sorting the Now Playing List (3.0)
In Now Playing, Enter:
(S)low (0)Zero (R)ecord (T)humbsUp
Press enter to switch sorting options.
short cut keys are
1 for normal
2 for experation date
3 for alphabetical
Re:What's with extra commercials anyway? (Score:5, Informative)
That amount of time is a good justification to actively skip commericals.
Re:I don't get it (Score:2, Informative)
While a DVR is recording (a VCR with the feature typically has to scan the program after taping to mark the commercials), it looks for a pattern of "fade-to-blacks". Just before each commercial, and just before the program resumes, there is typically a 1/10-3/10ths of a second black fade that "frames" each commercial (you'll notice it readily once you know to look for it). The DVR will look for a pattern of such fade-to-blacks that last 30 seconds (or 15 or 60) and come in groups. Unless it sees 2-3 of these fades hitting on 15/30/60 second boundaries, it will assume this is just a part of the program. Once it's decided that the pattern has been found, it simply marks the beginning and end of the pattern and skips over that material during playback. You can screw up the feature by showing odd-lengthed commercials (23 seconds), but at the moment the inertia of selling commercials in 30-second blocks is stronger than the need to prevent the 1% of the viewing public that has Commercial Advance from being able to use the feature. Occassionally, your local station will screw up the feature because they try to jam a quick news promo or local commercial into the network feed and botch the process by a few seconds. That's when you'll see the process screw up the commercial end by 10-15 seconds either way.
Re:I don't get it (Score:3, Informative)
Potentially commercials can have a higher average volume.
Another reason why I love my MythTV (Score:5, Informative)
I cannot emphasize just how cool this project is - it has all the features you'd expect from a modern DVR, and many more besides. It's open-source and immensely configurable. For example:
I also decided I'd like to be able to transfer recorded programs to my machine at work and watch them there, so I hacked up a little script to re-encode them at 100kbps, and added a "Watch Now" link to the MythWeb HTML web interface.
The other day my wife was complaining that the fonts on the screen were too small, so I tweaked the XML configuration file to bump them up a bit.
Thanks to LIRC, I can pretty much use any remote I like to control the box. I'm using an ancient, spare TV remote right now, and I can map the buttons whichever way I like.
It'll also optionally rip DVDs and CDs, enabling you to play them from the hard drive. It will also play pretty much any video file you have (through MPlayer). If I want to show the wife a movie trailer that I've downloaded from the internet, I just copy it over to the MythTV box, and she can watch it on the television.
Let's see you do all *that* with a Tivo!
Re:I don't get it (Score:1, Informative)
They are also to blame for the harsh sound of most albums for sale today. Search rec.audio.pro for 'loudness wars' for more information.
Friends (Score:3, Informative)
That's $6 mill per, by my math. That'll certainly up the costs of TV these days. Ask a TV actor from the 80s if they made even 1/10th of that.
I used to work in a TV studio (Score:3, Informative)
Of course this rarely happened due to the fact that college kids were running the place as interns and there was a *lot* of screwing up..
Anyway, I had been working on a circuit that would monitor the video stream for the fade to black and would mute the volume automagically on live TV. (This was about 20 years ago though.)
You would be amazed at the information that's encoded into a video stream that you can't see without special equipment. It's neat as hell. We used to send stuff out, like text messages in the VBI that only other techs could get. The FCC would have shit if they had known what was going on back then..
Anway, The point is that you can design circuits that KNOW (or are supposed to know) when commercials start and end and take action based on that. But it's not fool proof, it depends on the broadcaster sticking to the rules, and they rarely do...
Re:maybe im missing something... (Score:1, Informative)
I could be wrong, but I think this would violate their contract with the network. The network feeds contain "local station breaks" where the local stations (and cable carriers) can do insert their own commercials to generate their revenue.
Re:I don't get it (Score:2, Informative)
The thing that irritates me about this is that I have a very nice Panasonic VCR from about 2 years ago that also has this feature. You record the show, when the record is done, it goes back and marks the tape, and when you play it automatically goes through the commercials. This works correctly about 98% of the time (how is that for an exact number based on nothing?)
The ReplayTV works correctly about 90% of the time, and shows that have a lot of loud noise and black spaces cause it the most problems (Alias, 24, etc....)
Additionally, because it just skips, as opposed to fast forwarding, it is sometimes hard to tell if has messed up.
So, the same technology, licensed from the same company, has different results. Sounds like implementation problems. I also don't recall hearing that Panasonic was sued.
It's not 30 second skip that got them in trouble (Score:3, Informative)
networks say that the 30-second-skip is an infringing device under the DMCA because there is no substantial non-infringing use for a thirty-second skip ahead
It wasn't the 30 second skip that got RePlay in trouble, which is why the new RePlays (55xx) still have it, as do many VCR's. The older RePlays (50xx) had a feature called commercial skip, that by hitting a checkbox before playing the show would automatically skip commercials. It uses periods of fade to black to determine what it skips
I have a 5060, and I don't use comercial skip all that often, because it tends to confuse fade-to-black as part of a show, like those location screens in law and order, with commercials. It works well for shows that don't do that, however.
Re:I don't get it (Score:3, Informative)
TiVo skips too (Score:2, Informative)
KnoppMyth. (Score:2, Informative)
One could say that is very, very close to what you asked for.