Tsaiberspace

I am pleased to report that MythTV commercial detection has been working very well for the past month or so. It works just about perfectly for first-run network prime-time broadcasts, and works OK for some syndicated content.

During the summer, a lot of crappy movies get broadcast on syndication, and I watch a lot of them. These are characterized by an over-abundance of TV logos (logos often persist through commercial breaks) and an under-abundance of blank frames (broadcast often resumes with neither blank frame nor broadcast logo, what I refer to in the above-linked-to article as “scene changes”).

I just need to implement a good scene-change detector for this last case of commercial-detection failure, and I should be good. It will also bring my new commercial detection engine up to feature parity with the “old” one, making it ready to merge back into the mainline MythTV code.

Automatically skipping commercials is nice for the most part, but it makes me realize that we often need commercial breaks as an excuse to get up and use the bathroom, clear the coffee table, get something to drink, etc. Having to hit the “pause” button to take these breaks (and then slightly rewinding upon resumption) somehow seems like more work than simply waiting for a normal break and doing things during the break. Now if only MythTV could somehow detect bladder fullness or coffee-table clutteredness and automatically pause, and then automatically un-pause when I’m back in the couch …

Since I’ve been watching way too many commercials in an attempt to automatically skip them, I may as well share some interesting tidbits of results from my research:

• A good, highly-rated prime-time show like Law & Order is approximately 35% advertising and 65% show.
• A slightly-less good, still-highly-rated prime-time show like any of the CSI shows is approximately 30% advertising and 70% show.
• A crappy guilty-pleasure prime-time show like “The Unit” is approximately 25% advertising 75% show (more like 65% show and 10% last-week’s recap and scenes-from-next-week’s episode).

So far, so good. A good show can sell more ads than a crappy show, but they can’t sell so many advertising minutes that people get annoyed and stop watching. However:

• Daytime soaps are an excruciating 50% advertising and 50% show (even lower than that, with recaps).

The soap viewers must have large bladders or be super-captive or have nothing else to do, or the advertising rate must be super-cheap. No matter how cheap, it still raises the question in my mind of what would happen if a network just could not get any advertising money for some time slot. Would they just go off-air, like some local stations do at night?