[mythtvnz] Commercial Flagging

[Ross Williamson]

Commercial flagging always used to work about 95% of the time for me 
until a few years ago when it started going downhill. It's now at the 
point where I can't make it work most of the time so it is more of a 
hindrance than a help. When I last used it, I'd more often than not end 
up with the situation where it would skip the wanted programme more than 
the commercials!

There was a discussion on this list a few years ago and "logo 
detection" was determined to be the best option for detection method. I 
ran this for a while (and it seemed to work on a number of channels) but 
now it is next to useless in my experience.

It always struck me that adding audio detection methods would make this 
process far more reliable. I haven't investigated, but I would imagine 
that the commflag process would make this impossible to add in as-is 
without significant re-work. Maybe also some heuristics wouldn't go 
amiss (eg for detecting missed breaks and not skipping the actual 
programme based on time of breaks etc) but this is probably significant 
challenge given the wild variations between networks.

I've reverted to just skipping and not bothering with commflag.

Ross