[mythtvnz] Query about effectiveness of ad skipping

[Wade Maxfield]

>On Wed, 2006-02-08 at 15:02 +1300, Jason Haar wrote:
>[ad skipping doesn't always work]
>>  Is this a black art, or are there "magic settings" I should be using?
>
>It's a black art. Actually, black is an important factor :)
>
>In the US, ad breaks are _very_ distinctive. There's a decent amount of
>black-level video either side of the set of commericals. In NZ, we don't
>cut ads in that way, it's done frame-accurate so there's rarely more
>than one frame of black, if any.
>
>That makes it much much harder to do ad detection here.
>
>I believe that's what Myth does (black-level detection), but I'm sure
>someone with more knowledge of the internals will correct me :)
>
>--
>David Zanetti <david.zanetti@catalyst.net.nz>
>Team Leader, Systems Administration
>Catalyst IT Limited
>+64-4-8032233 +64-21-402260

I'm don't have more knowledge of the internals, but in the commercial 
detection settings there are 3 methods mentioned, Blank Frame being 
one of them.  There's also Logo Detection and Scene Change.

Personally I've got my machine set up to use all 3 with strict (I 
don't know why it's just the setting I tried one day and seems to 
work for me).  It gets it right on about 80% of all recordings, with 
Discovery and History being pretty much spot on.

  - Wade