[vdr] Re: Proposal: cutting out advertising automatically

[Andreas Mair <Andreas.Mair@linogate.com>]

Hi,

On Monday 21 October 2002 23:54, Harald Milz wrote:
> Hi,
>
> now that we have an MPEG-2 stream on disk, has anybody thought about
> (semi-) automatically deleting all the advertising blocks from the
> recordings?
>
> Some ways of doing the job come to my mind:
>
> 1. Last week at Systems, a German firm announced a subscriber
> service which offers cutting data for most video transmissions. Real
> humans watch the films and compile the data.  I cannot find any
> reference to the new service on Google, though. Does anyone have a
> pointer?  There is already one service like that ("Fernsehfee", TC's
> Classification Signal, http://www.telecontrol.de/products/b2b.htm
> (*)), where the data is available over the internet and FM (UKW)
> RDS. The service is directed towards businesses e.g.  set-top-box
> makers, not end customers. I suspect we cannot add the interface
> to an open source system because although there is a test access
> available you need to sign an NDA. Sigh.  (*) for non-Germans:
> http://babelfish.altavista.com/urltrurl?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.telecontrol.de
>%2Fproducts%2Fb2b.htm&lp=de_en&tt=url

I believe it will not be available for free.

> 2. We could analyze the MPEG-2 data stream for a number of sensible
> criteria (sender logo present; average loudness; ratio of scene change;
> etc, anything else?, then produce a probability for commercials) and
> produce a suggestion for cutting.

I like this idea. There had been some discussion on this list some time ago.
I believe that commercials shouldn't be cut automatically, but the marks 
should be set. So it would be possible to skip a commercial while viewing or 
manually start cutting when the marks are verified. With this method you 
won't cut/miss part of the recording.

> 3. We could set up a data base to collect cutting data. Everybody cutting
> a video could upload the data to this server, and everybody else could use
> it. Something like freedb.org or so. Like P2P networks this may result in
> some people uploading fake data to disrupt the service, though, so that
> proper encryption schemes may be needed. Even then, somebody may subscribe
> and upload fake data. The system may need a voting scheme in addition.

Don't like this idea. How would you manage the data? There has to be an entry 
for every recording any time it started. I mean MovieXYZ at 20:15 o'clock 
will have commercials placed different then the same movie repeated at 03:00 
o'clock. Not to speak of the movie repeated a year later at another channel. 
And finally, how do you want to handle the leading minutes before the movie 
starts (everyone can set it to his/her preference)?

Regards,
Andreas


-- 
Info:
To unsubscribe send a mail to listar@linuxtv.org with "unsubscribe vdr" as subject.