MythTV Commercial Detection

How does MythTV's Commercial Detection work? Surprisingly well. Ever wonder how it does such a good job of identifying commercials?

There are three key indicators that MythTV uses from recorded content to identify commercials.

I've created a short movie clip of the MythTV Commercial Detection in action. About a second or two after the commercial starts, I hit the commercial skip button. You can see how MythTV skips to the end of the commercial break.

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.