Yup, you'll find threads (often including me) about man of these sorts of features. The long term version -- aggregating which parts of programs people watch at normal speed and which they don't -- provides the only undefeatable commercial detection algorithm, unless you are among the first to watch a show, but it's a long way off. Fingerprints based on various video and audio fingerprinting -- or even easier, on closed caption text when present -- is a lot easier. Some of these can actually be applied without collaboration, in that once you have identified a budweiser commercial by its closed caption text you can spot it again everywhere. (Of course not all commercials have captions.)
A _really_ fancy fingerprinting system could actually fingerprint shows and notice when the same snippet of video appears in two different shows -- almost always a commercial, but not always always -- and then cleverly delete the redundant fragment and point to it. (Something myth can't yet do of course but may be planned for the future.) One reason that's interesting is that aside from spotting repeated commercials and repeated shows, it can also let you browse the commercials and start learning what they are. Ie. some people like to capture the movie trailers. Though web download is often a better idea there.
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