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Comment by ztetranz | Hacker News Reader

Way back in the days of video recorders, analog TV etc, I remember hearing talk of trying to detect ads on broadcast TV to either pause recording or maybe provide some sort of skip functionality on playback.

I think they did something looking at the horizontal sync signal. The was a clear discontinuity when the station switched from program to ad and back again.

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For broadcast, there are at least a few open source ad detectors: https://github.com/erikkaashoek/Comskip, https://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Mythcommflag

I don’t know about the others, but Comskip is completely broken as far as I can tell and hasn’t been updated in years.

In the early 200s my family has a DVR called a ReplayTV. It was like a TiVo but it had an auto-skip function for commercials, and it usually worked pretty well.

There was an ad-skipping feature of early DVRs that reacted to a sudden increase of volume. Yup, TV stations would broadcast the ads louder than the shows.

My parents still use a TiVo and it as ad skipping features: https://tivoidp.tivo.com/tivoCommunitySupport/s/article/Skip...

I think the ads might be manually tagged, which would be a lot easier with hundreds of broadcast shows, instead of thousands/millions of random videos on youtube.

Sweet Christ that brings up horrible memories of scrambling across the living room to turn down the volume on a knob when I was seriptitiously watching late night tv. The volume on the shows were good, but the damn commercials were SO LOUD.

I blame a local car dealer for most of my groundings as a child.

Sadly they are still louder than the rest. This is why i like my public broadcasting: no ads after 20:00 until 6:00

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