[vdr] Proposal: cutting out advertising automatically

[Harald Milz <hm@seneca.muc.de>]

Hi,

now that we have an MPEG-2 stream on disk, has anybody thought about
(semi-) automatically deleting all the advertising blocks from the
recordings?

Some ways of doing the job come to my mind:

1. Last week at Systems, a German firm announced a subscriber
service which offers cutting data for most video transmissions. Real
humans watch the films and compile the data.  I cannot find any
reference to the new service on Google, though. Does anyone have a
pointer?  There is already one service like that ("Fernsehfee", TC's
Classification Signal, http://www.telecontrol.de/products/b2b.htm
(*)), where the data is available over the internet and FM (UKW)
RDS. The service is directed towards businesses e.g.  set-top-box
makers, not end customers. I suspect we cannot add the interface
to an open source system because although there is a test access
available you need to sign an NDA. Sigh.  (*) for non-Germans:
http://babelfish.altavista.com/urltrurl?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.telecontrol.de%2Fproducts%2Fb2b.htm&lp=de_en&tt=url

2. We could analyze the MPEG-2 data stream for a number of sensible
criteria (sender logo present; average loudness; ratio of scene change;
etc, anything else?, then produce a probability for commercials) and
produce a suggestion for cutting. 

3. We could set up a data base to collect cutting data. Everybody cutting
a video could upload the data to this server, and everybody else could use
it. Something like freedb.org or so. Like P2P networks this may result in
some people uploading fake data to disrupt the service, though, so that
proper encryption schemes may be needed. Even then, somebody may subscribe
and upload fake data. The system may need a voting scheme in addition.

At the moment, #2 seems to most feasible and least disruptible way to go.
Whether or not and how the film industry reacts is a different question -
but in Europe there seems no way of legally jeopardizing this method on
open source systems. It also is no circumvention device (a la DMCA) because
it does not illegally provide access to something.

Any thoughts?


-- 
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.


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