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Commercial cuts on SMPTE color bars?

 

 

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gcasillo at ket

Dec 4, 2003, 9:57 PM

Post #1 of 3 (897 views)
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Commercial cuts on SMPTE color bars?

I have yet to try MythTV, but I am working on a pretty large video
streaming/archiving project at work that may have use of it. We encode &
archive all of our state legislature's General Assembly including
committee meetings and House/Senate chambers, and one thing I could
really use is the ability to cut out large chunks of SMPTE color bars.
We a couple of direct broadcast signals that we encode from that are
color bars when nothing is actually airing.

For example, we know a meeting is supposed to start at 10:00am, but
policitians are on their own time, so meetings typically start fifteen
minutes or so late. That means, I usually have fifteen minutes of color
bars (no audio tone) preceeding the actual meeting that I have to go
back and trim off. Plus, with our current setup (which uses
RealNetwork's line of software and some Perl scripts I wrote), we have
to tell our encoders when to stop. So we create an event for this
meeting to encode from 10:00am to, say, 2:00pm. Often, the actual
meeting lasts an hour or so, so we have about two and half hours of
color bars on the tail end that we have to go back and trim off.

As I said, we currently use RealProducer to encode stuff to RealVideo
files for archival and streaming playback. But we are building out some
new machines to encode to MPEG-2 files (and transcode to several
formats) using WinTV PVR-250 cards and Linux. Woot!

So my question: can MythTV look for and cut out color bars as it does
for commercials between black frames?

Thanks,
Gregg Casillo
Kentucky Educational Television


cpinkham at bc2va

Dec 5, 2003, 9:43 AM

Post #2 of 3 (858 views)
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Re: Commercial cuts on SMPTE color bars? [In reply to]

> So my question: can MythTV look for and cut out color bars as it does
> for commercials between black frames?

It doesn't now but could be made to with a little bit of work. Kind of a
small-target audience though, but patches welcome...

A function would go across each frame scanning each column of video looking
for at least columns of a near-single color then with a quick transition
to another near-single color, then another, etc.. Check for whatever number
of transitions there should be and if there is the correct number then that
frame contains a colorbar. Keep a list of when colorbars are onscreen and
flag them as commercials.

Are you trying to flag these for cutting or for playback of the original
file without commercials? If you're cutting them out, just use the editor
to cut out the colorbar portions then transcode.

--

Chris


jim at jtan

Dec 5, 2003, 10:30 AM

Post #3 of 3 (860 views)
Permalink
Re: Commercial cuts on SMPTE color bars? [In reply to]

> A function would go across each frame scanning each column of video looking
> for at least columns of a near-single color then with a quick transition
> to another near-single color, then another, etc.. Check for whatever number
> of transitions there should be and if there is the correct number then that
> frame contains a colorbar.

Since the image will always be the same, it would be a lot easier to
just try matching each frame to a static image of the colorbars
(sum the squares of differences, or something). Then it would be
easily usable for matching other still images, too.

-jim

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