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MythTV Commercial Flagging - First Impressions

I used the commercial detection feature in 0.19 last night for the first time. Why did I just try it last night, when I've been running MythTV for a while now? Well, a couple weeks ago I had to rebuild my backend after an unfortunate power loss and kernel corruption situation. I probably didn't really need to rebuild it from scratch, but I decided it was easier.

My backend is a little 400Mhz CPU, and in the previous install, I had disabled the automatic commercial flagging due to the low end CPU. In this install, I basically put on a stock MythDora installation, which has commercial flagging on by default. Last night I learned how to use it.

Update 10/14/2006:
I've created a short demonstration video of MythTV Commercial Detection in action!


Update 10/07/2006:
It's worth pointing out that the 30 second skip function is not the same as the commercial skip function. That is something easilly confused by users new to MythTV. If you are using the 30 second skip function to skip through commercials and don't think the commercial skip function is all it's cracked up to be...well, that's because you are not using it...read on.



It's really simple really, when using a KnoppMyth frontend on my laptop, the keys are Z to skip to the next flagged break, and Q to skip to the previous one.

Well, it was not perfect. It got a couple of breaks one commercial too soon, but another tap of Z quickly brought it to the right place.

Really I was quite impressed not only by how well it flagged the commercials, but also how seemlessly MythTV was able to skip to the next flagging point. Not real delay. For a show that starts and ends each segment with a "bumper" image and music, the only way to tell Myth even was responding to my Z press was the immediate change in the audio. The transition was really that clean.

If you are not a user of the feature, I suggest you give it a try. It worked a lot better than I expected it to, and don't expect to use the 30 second skip feature much more in the future, which was my previous method of skipping commercials.

What's your experience with commercial flagging? Leave a comment below and let me know if your experience is like mine.

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MythTV Commercial Detection

Hi, I have used Myth Commercial flagging for about two months and have found it to be very reliable. All programs except one have had and almost perfect run, using the auto skip feature you dont even need to push anything to skip commercials. The failures I have detected involve commerial breaks extremly close to the end of shows, this usually involves skipping past the last segment of the show never returning from the commercial break. Adjusting the maximum break time has helped with this somewhat. One particular show has been able to repeatedly reproduce errors in commercial flagging. It seems to have to do with blank frame detection. The show which exhibits a blank frame every episode is the animated series Code Lyoko. Overal the feature is awesome,

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