Commercial detection and skipping

[John54016]

I was watching a recording and noticed that it didn't automatically skip commercials.

Does the DVR software have commercial detection and, if so, can someone explain where to configure it?

[jasonl]

Commercial detection/skipping is not a feature of the DVR.

[John54016]

Well, that is disappointing. Most modern DVR solutions have this feature.

Is there a reason why your team has not implemented this feature?

[jasonl]

Detecting commercials requires a fairly powerful system to decode and analyze the audio and video. The HDHomeRun DVR is intentionally designed to be very lightweight and able to run on minimal hardware, including FLEX devices and low-end NAS boxes. It also has no knowledge of the audio and video data, everything is just raw data to it.

[gtb]

Detecting commercials requires a fairly powerful system to decode and analyze the audio and video. The HDHomeRun DVR is intentionally designed to be very lightweight and able to run on minimal hardware, including FLEX devices and low-end NAS boxes. It also has no knowledge of the audio and video data, everything is just raw data to it.

While I am not going to suggest that SD do so (I prefer a "skip forward 30 seconds" button which is more fine grained and handles the anomaly cases (as mentioned below)), as I understand it, the current "state of the art" is that all streams include various markings (I believe I was told the CC markings, and not the relative timestamps, as the CC markings are reasonably aligned with the actual content), and that a national recording (usually only for a few "major" channels for an evening) was made by the solution provider who uses an advanced algorithm[0] to provide the (national) commercial break times which are then provided to the local playback solution for alignment and sync (based on the CC markings) with the national markings and then support skipping[2].  There were/are various licensed IP technologies involved[1][3].  In practice this works some of the time (and not all of the time), but usually good enough, and this does not require local processing (which is, as you say, is not viable for local low power storage solutions).




[0] In previous times, some of those providers used what were (derogatorily) referred to as "skip monkeys", which exploited low cost labor in certain locations to actually watch the video to detect and mark commercials, or, perhaps at a later time, to validate the automated detections. At some point those "skip monkeys" were eliminated entirely (even cheap labor is not always cheap enough).

[1] And note that this is a cat/mouse problem, as the broadcasters mostly really don't want one to skip commercials, so they try to make it hard to do the detection.  Early attempts used audio or video artifacts to detect a commercial, but as the broadcasters learned about the techniques to detect the breaks they adjusted to make it harder. While I don't use the commercial skip solution from one well known solution provider, I regularly hear it does nor work (properly) from one of my clients.

[2] The time to do the after the recording analysis has varied, but is usually a few hours from the original broadcast (so skipping data was not real-time, but a few hours later, but works fine for many).

[3] Almost anything one wants has someone claiming various IP rights on the techniques.  Some of those claims may be valid, some of those claims may not be valid, and some of the techniques may be able be done in a different way to avoid the various IP claims.  And that is why one's IP lawyer needs to be involved early and often in any such planning.

[nickk]

There are no commercial markings in the broadcast.

A good percentage of adverts do no contain closed captioning. No closed captioning due to an advert and no closed captioning due to nobody talking look the same.

[Ken.F]

There are no commercial markings in the broadcast.

A good percentage of adverts do no contain closed captioning. No closed captioning due to an advert and no closed captioning due to nobody talking look the same.

Comskip still works pretty well. It would be great if the HDHomeRun app worked with .edl files even if commercial skipping is not officially supported. Leave it up to the user to figure out how to generate them.

[tzr916]

Are you sure the HDHR App does not honor .EDL markers during playback? If true, that's pretty sad.

I have a SD subscription that I use the guide info for in Jriver Media Center. Been using comskip with Jriver for 10 years, and WMC before that. Would it be difficult to add this feature to the HDHR App?

Unfortunately if ATSC 3.0 survives with DRM, I won't be able to use Jriver for OTA. I would be forced to switch to the HDHR App, and comskip cannot process DRM recorded files! OTA DRM is truly going to be a lose/lose situation. Heck, I'm not even sure that processing non-DRM ATSC 3.0 files is currently supported in comskip. Right now ATSC 1.0 with Jriver + comskip works perfect for me, until all this gets sorted.

[techpro2004]

Try using mcebuddy. It is 100% compatible with the hdhr dvr and others.

edit: fyi it is windows only.

[emveepee]

Even without DRM for ATSC 3, since FFmpeg doesn't officially have AC-4 codec support then comskip won't work on the volume and silence changes and I suspect it won't be as good at detecting the breaks. Has anyone tested that?

[tzr916]

Not recently. I had a few years ago and could not get it working. The comskip forum was been taken down, so I can't even link to my post(s) there. They moved to Github. I am a few releases behind.... Jriver can actually play ATSC 3.0, decoding AC4 to 6 channels properly, but I don't watch or record any ATSC 3.0 because of DRM.