Commercials

[falchulk]

Yes, I know the case. I just have not heard there was a verdict saying it was legal.

[Fluffdaddy]

Big Hollywood did an fast end around when it looked like eff.org was going to win. What they did was say it was alright for "The Five" test cases guys to use CA. and promise the judge that they would not sue any end users. so the judge let them drop they case.............But Big Hollywood never said they would not sue companies that offer or make commercial skip software or hardware so it's legal for us end users to use it, But if developers are fearful of making it..........see what I mean

[TunaBoo]

So put a plugin system in sageTV. make it really simple to add commercial skip, and then let us get from each other and install

[Cayars]

There's no reason at all why Frey couldn't build an automatic "scene/chapter detection" into SageTV. As long as they don't skip the commercials for us automatically they wouldn't have much to worry about. Even if they did skip commercials automatically I don't think they would have a problem with it.

The movie studios are going to have a very hard fight on their hands winning this battle. They don't have much going for them to win the battle. It's not like naptser where there is some type of illegal thing going on. At present they would first have to make a case that some present law is being broken.

Just because they could lose out on advertising dollars doesn't mean we consumers broke any law. We have always been able to skip commercials (bathroom break. grab food, grab a brew, go outside for a smoke, etc). It is not our responsibility to keep movie studios (et all) profitable by watching commercials. All this will eventually prove is that they need to get with the times and find outher ways of income. <-- could end up worse for the consumer.

I myself don't understand why the Judges haven't thrown out the present cases since the studios don't hold the copyrights to the commercials that have been "stolen" anyway. It's the Coke, Pepsi, Buds of the world who would stand a better chance of theft charges anyway.

Enough rambling on my part for one night/morning.

Carlo

[Cayars]

BTW, just to add to this. It's not all roses. Having background tasks running to process your mpg files does eat up CPU time and hard disk bandwidth. It CAN BE the difference between a barely working system and one that now stutters on playback because of background tasks.

There are drawbacks to commercial/chapter skipping too.

Carlo

[falchulk]

Cayars, you are correct there. The BTV method pretty much had your HD churning all day long.

[TunaBoo]

pbbbt my SAGE TV server has plenty of spare time. Thats why it would be an option not a forceful feature.

[Sailn]

As I understood it, replay's problem was that it didn't record the commerical at all. The implied contract, which really seems over-the-top, that the networks mentioned is that you the view agree to watch commercials for the right to view free network programming. Oh please, commercial are when you go to the head, the fridge, etc.

Anyway, to me it seems that the easy low tech way to do this it to create a bookmark file for each recording. Many tv shows have a defined patern of commercial breaks. The syndicated Law and Order has commercial breaks that are almost the same for every show. You could create a file of start and stop times for commercials for one episode and apply it to all others.

[falchulk]

Sailn, syndicatd shows are at the mercy of the indivdual stations that air them. They can do whatever they want for break duration.

[JPW]

This pretty much tops the list for me for functions I would like to see added to sagetv. I have a Panasonic VCR I bought a few years back that has automatic commercial skip and it blows me away that don't see it offered with pvr software. It would be easy to get past the legal issues by simply recording the commercials just like my vcr does. However, once the recording is done the pvr could go back and look at the structure of the video and put cues where the commercials begin and end. This is what my vcr does so when I play it back it simply ff through the commercial. I am constantly amazed just how well of a job it does. If a vcr can do it surely a pvr app can be made do it.

One of the previous posters did have a good point about the cpu utilization though when something like this activity would be taking place. My suggestion would be to have a setting in the app where you could tell it when to process. It could be done directly after the show has been recorded if the htpc was strictly used as a htpc or it could be set to run as a batch at 2 am or whatever designated time.

Just a thought. I really can't believe there isn't already a tool out there to do this kind of thing.

[JasonJoel]

Although I would never use it, I would still like the capability added (I tried it on two different systems now and it never works to MY satisfaction).

Doesn't seem like it would even be hard to do. Have to decide on the detection mechanisms (two were listed earlier) and add a sensitivity setting, maybe a scheduler, etc. But nothing earth shattering...

Jason

[mikesm]

The Replay did/does record the commercial - if the logic makes a mistake, you can turn it off and replay the scene... It does the mapping of commercials on the fly though. It doesn't have to finish to figure it out, it just needs the first 2 minutes before it begins processing.

MythTV however will go ahead and remove them from the recorded program as a postprocessing step. Commericial skip is very desireable, esp if you have kids. I know folks who work at Tivo but have a replaytv unit at home for the kids. Kids commercials these days are very bad, and bypassing the commercials is very important if you let kids watch TV at all.

The MythTV code that does commercial detection and skipping is licensed under the GPL - it would be great if Sage ported it to SageTV. It would probably get me to leave myth for Sage. I have little kids at home so this is an important feature for me.

Thanks,
Mike

[boris]

Ah Commercial skip.... I love my Replay TV because of this. But I must also say it only works about 90% of the time.

The thing that bugs me is coworkers ask "hey did you see that new movie preview comming out?" - I laugh and say, "My TV doesnt show commercials" and they look at me funny.

I would love to have this ability on Sage.

Thanks for listening,
Boris

[Deadbolt]

I know most argue that commercial skip doesn't work well enough...and if it is never installed it won't. I think if there were plugin detection algorithms that users could develop...where you could use more than one, and you could apply different algorithms to different channels/shows it may get very accurate.

[krutaw]

Originally posted by Deadbolt
I know most argue that commercial skip doesn't work well enough...and if it is never installed it won't. I think if there were plugin detection algorithms that users could develop...where you could use more than one, and you could apply different algorithms to different channels/shows it may get very accurate.

Agreed, and this specific feature is the one that makes me look at MythTV over and over. While I am a linux head, though, I must say it's alot more difficult to setup.

Alas, it seems that anyone willing to make it easy to install, isn't willing to take the extra step that would make the program worth double it's price in my opinion. *SHRUG* I guess when I finally get tired of playing around, I will go back to linux.

[mikesm]

Knoppmyth isn't that hard to install if you don't have too exotic a configuration. I find it it's important to decouple storage from the Myth backend. That lets you put the large drives in another place in the house that doesn't have to be as quiet as where the TV is. And let's you offer up SMB mounted so things like XBMC can access the media store as well. You can use windows or Linux for that.

Commercial skip isn't perfect on the Replays or Myth, but I find that Myth does a pretty good job. As I said, I can't live without this feature for my kids, even though I'd rather use a supported product like Sage. I too am a Unix geek, but would rather use supported code that is usually easier to configure and manage. Myth isn't there yet, but the feature set is something that really attracts me and makes the upkeep worth it.

If Beyond TV or Sage would give me equivalent fucntionality I'd move in a heartbeat, but noone seems to want to sell me that option. Open source generally exists because of gaps in commercial offerings. This is another example of that.

Thanks,
Mike