Commercial Advance

[Droid]

I know this should be in the feature request list and I did search to find out whats up, but didnt see any conclusive info so I apologize if I am beating a dead horse...

I am a previous / Tivo then Replay user and LOVE my sage ... The only thing I miss is commercial advance. Despite what I read in the forums it DID work well (later revision of replay) for most programs (except X-files) and would really like this. Is this on the plan??? (whispering.... or is there some way I can turn this on.../whispering )

Thanks

Andy

[malore]

As far as I know there are no plans to add this feature and there is no secret way to enable it. I think I remember about a year ago Narflex indicating that he wasn't going to do it, but that he wouldn't be opposed to a plugin that could.

If someone found or developed a Windows program that analyzes a mpeg-2 file and generates a list of program breaks, then it would be would be possible for someone with access to SageTV Studio to make a custom stv file that allows you to skip commercials.

Found the posts

Originally posted by dkardatzke
At this point we are going to avoid both Commercial Advance and Facilitating the sharing of recordings for obvious legal reasons. The only possibility would be the commercial advance feature in the future, but that only opens us up to potential lawsuits from the television industry.

Originally posted by Narflex
Your best shot at seeing something like commercial advance show up were to be if someone were to provide some sort of DirectShow filter I could just plug in that would then generate 'bookmarking' information. The main key being we don't provide the thing that detects the commercials. Then I could have something else that played back files according to this generated bookmark information, sort of like an advanced playlist feature. Even some sort of EXE post processor that analyzes the MPEG2 file and then outputs a bookmark file is even feasible.

[mbrown3]

SOMEONE DO IT!!! I'll pay extra for that feature (and I'm sure a lot of other folks would, too).

[stanger89]

To further elaborate, I believe the reason Frey won't include it in Sage is that commercial skipping is a rather sticky subject legally and Frey just isn't equipped to defend themselves (not many companies are) if the MPAA/et all take notice and decide put preasure on Frey.

But as malore said, all it would take is for someone to write (or find) an app that can analyze recordings and output an XML (or similar) with "chapter breaks" and it would be relatively simple for someone with Studio to do the appropriate changes to support "chapters."

[mbrown3]

SOMEONE DO IT!!! I'll pay extra for that feature (and I'm sure a lot of other folks would, too).

[Droid]

Well, the way replay handled it (on the new 5540's) (I had the old 5040 that did real skip) was to tag the breaks and chapterize the stream. This allowed me to skip ahead to the next chapter, which oh, by the way a comercial break is a chapter. This isnt "skipping commercials" and it would be a generally nice feature.

[lovingHDTV]

I've even thought of being able to hit a button while watching my show that would put the chapter breaks in. Then when it is viewed again, you could skip the chapters.

I hit the ffwd button already to skip past the commercial, if I could also get it to dump the info for later use that would be nice.

EDIT, then I can have my kids process my shows

I can see the post already "need comercial xml for episode 114 of friends"

[Fluffdaddy]

SOMEONE DO IT!!! I'll pay extra for that feature (and I'm sure a lot of other folks would, too).

[garyc]

For the past 10 years all of the VCRs we've bought had Commercial Advance built-in (RCAs at first, then Panasonics). Worked great (still does, although we rarely use the VCRs anymore) -- automatically jumps into FF and displays a blue screen while skipping the commercials, and RARELY makes mistakes.

Replay TV had the same thing -- but got sued into submission and removed it. I guess RCA & Panasonic had big enough checkbooks to keep the TV folks from suing them -- or perhaps the "instant skip" in the digital world seemed more threatening.

In any event, it is a GREAT feature -- and I agree with mbrown that I'd pay for a plug-in that did this. A post-recording processor that marked the chapters with a particular key for apparent commercials, with an automatic "skip chapters with a certain key" kind of capability should allow this to be implemented so it's just as automatic as the commercial version of Commercial Advance. A reasonable 2nd choice would be a "skip chapter" button that would manually skip commercials at the press of a button on the remote.

[Fluffdaddy]

I just get the feeling it will not happen. Commercial Advance is the only thing that is keeping me from giving up my ReplayTv 5040's on my other two Tv set's

I would be at 'least' a two sagetv home with Commercial Advance.

A 3rd party plug-in would be something I would pay for

[mbrown3]

Is there anyone with the technical know-how that is willing to tackle this project (and perhaps make some money off it once up and running)?!?!?

PLEASE?!?

[walts81]

If Snapstream can do it, I see no reason why Sage couldn't offer a similar feature. Just my 2 cents.

[Fluffdaddy]

Originally posted by walts81
If Snapstream can do it, I see no reason why Sage couldn't offer a similar feature. Just my 2 cents.

The reason is they don't want too. That's why a 3rd party will have to come to our rescue.

[littlerm]

I have been trying out Sage, BTV, and MythTV. Commercial skip works VERY WELL in MythTV and works pretty good in BTV. If SageTV had commercial skip it would be the perfect product for me.

BTV - Good commercial skip, limited recording options

SageTV - Excellent recording options, no commercial skip

MythTV - Excellent everything, including commercial skip. NForce2 but DD5.1 doesn't work on Linux!

I have yet to find the perfect PVR for me, but they are getting closer!

[malore]

I've made an initial implementation of commercial advance, but its not quit ready for release. The commercial detection program will be open source. It uses libmpeg2 to read the mpeg2 files and I added commercial detection by rewritting and tweaking some of the commercial detection code from mythTV. Currently, I'm just using the blank scene detection, because the accuracy of the scene change detection was somewhat poor and the CPU usage was high. Any Visual C programmers interested in working on this?

[Jere_Jones]

OUTSTANDING!!!!

[ErsatzTom]

Are you going to try to implement it as a direct show filter so that it can detect commercials in real time or just as a stand alone app? (I was actually playing with this myself but haven't gotten nearly as far as you have due to many time constraints).

t

[malore]

Just as a standalone app. Are there any examples of a system that does real time commercial detection?

[ErsatzTom]

I'm not sure but it should be possible to put a DirectShow filter into the graph. I'm not sure how much horse power that would require for a multi-tuner system. I'd think that even if you did that you would want to be able to schedule stand alone detection for times when it couldn't keep up... if an asynchronous filter were developed it could just give up and mark the show for later stand alone detection if it fell too far behind stream without blocking it.

However, take all of this with a big grain of salt. I write code for a living but mostly on the server side. I'm not a ui or video guy at all. I mostly talk to databases and do networking stuff.

t

[ErsatzTom]

Also, I don't suppose the output format is close to, um, other software output so as to make it work with VideoReDo?

t