Tv commercial replacement
QuattroRS4
Posts: 916
Hello all - It has been a long time since I graced this fine forum.
Just as a thought I was wondering if anybody has done analysis on tv /sat signals to detect and replace advertisements / commercials.
I can see there are a few streaming based solutions but what I would be looking for is to perhaps develop a standalone hardware solution.
Your thoughts on the subject are welcomed..
Just as a thought I was wondering if anybody has done analysis on tv /sat signals to detect and replace advertisements / commercials.
I can see there are a few streaming based solutions but what I would be looking for is to perhaps develop a standalone hardware solution.
Your thoughts on the subject are welcomed..
Comments
Turn the TV off.
Go to the internet and find the Parallax forums. (Ah, you did that already).
Get some project(s) going that you can discuss here.
Join in and try help out with projects other guys are doing.
Some years later....should you happen to look up from your IDE or soldering iron...you will find that TV as we used to know it in the pre-internet days is obsolete and nobody watches it any more.
Or at least, that is what happened to me. Not that I was ever much into TV since leaving the family home many decades ago.
Sadly, you now have to turn your attention to blocking advertising on web sites instead....
Whilst I love engineering and technology I still have this old fashioned idea that technical solutions are not necessarily the answer to all our problems.
Now, from what little I'm aware of good old television broadcasts now a days I have noticed one thing. The commercials have a lot louder audio than the program they are embedded in. It's really annoying when 'er-in-doors is watching telly quietly and all of a sudden I'm deafened by commercials for washing up liquid or diapers or whatever it is that girls need once a month or toilet cleaner.
So one sure way to filter adds is to monitor the audio volume.
Having said that, I have heard tell that there is sometimes some indication of commercials in the TV signal itself. I have no idea about that and it seems complex and unreliable.
"Way back when", commercials were noted by an "all black" level for a defined amount of time in the TV signal. There used to be "commercial zappers" that detected this event and muted the audio.
I believe that the broadcasters are more clever these days and have circumvented this.
I hate to say it, but what you are suggesting is illegal in my area, you can record a show, and then fast forward, but to intercept prior would be unlawful.:frown:
"The Matrix has you..."
Some decades ago TV companies produced such classics as "Dr Who", "The Avenegers", "Not only...but also" (Peter Cook and Dudley Moore) and many others.
What did they do? They reused the video tapes and otherwise lost their legacy. In the case of "Dr Who" some of these have been recovered from long lost archives in the basements of TV companies in South Africa or where ever.
My conclusion?
I don't care what copyright law says about anything. If you find something interesting or funny or artistic or of whatever value that you might like to see, hear or read again, or have available to your friends, then you have a moral duty to make a copy and save it.
History shows that the "rights holders" do not care at all. Even now a million miles of movie footage is rotting in basements of rights holders, lost to the world for ever.
I am right there with you heater, but I don't know where to look for these people either. Gonna need a bigger boat to find the luxury island they are hiding on..
The commercials are different in each case and there are delays from one service to another on the same channels.
So, there is a way, legal or not to get rid of such offensive material.
In my free time (what's that?), I tend to watch commercial-free European re-broadcast channels or PBS when there is nothing I like on the USA content pay and pay system.
I'm quite happy with OTA Digital TV in the Bay Area now. All those retro channels not available on cable, etc... are a blast. Have you seen Hogan's Heros lately?
My parents watch TV nearly constantly. Once in a while I catch Jeopardy while I am visiting, then I really see how much I don't know about current celebrities and trivia.
But like I said, I still watch plenty of good shows and movies. I wish there was not so much garbage on TV is my main point, but since there is, I don't watch it.
I dumped cable/air TV years ago.. I don't miss it. Even more I don't miss the commercials.
@Jon, I still watch movies and even go to the theater when there is something worth paying the "big screen" for. (It's getting more and more difficult to justify more than a handful of movies a year.)
As far as a project is concerned, aren't most commericials aired on a timed sequence?
Seems you could combine a RTC check with a light sensor and probably make a reasonable educated guess on if it was a commecial.
How do the DVR's do it?
I wonder if anyone has used a camera , a database and some face recognition software to identify commercials. time it out , do whatever and switch it back. It could work but you would have to train it for each commercial. LOL
The suggestion to 'not watch tv' obviously doesn't answer my question.
After all, in the months and years you might spend researching, building, experimenting with such a gadget you won't have any time to actually watch TV:)
Twenty years ago a friend had a video recorder that was programmed to record programs but pause recording for the videos.
It used the fact that identifier codes for the commercials were at the beginning and end of the splice. Needless to say this invention never made it to the marketplace in any appreciable numbers before being quashed.