automatically find blank/black frames

[Anonymous]

Not exactly sure if this is a new feature request or a support issue. Am new to V-R, but think it is a great program already. Good Job!!
I use it so far to cut commercials out of mpegs i have extracted from a Dish PVR 510. What i have noticed is there is usually, not always, a blank/black frame? when the program cuts to a commercial, and same when program resumes. Would it be possible for V-R to autosearch and mark these? or is this a feature already. I would think a user would still have to scan to check it marked the rite points. As well in the case the blank/black mite not be at a prog/comm break as expected, would still need to be added manually. I am sorta lazy, but this would be an awesome feature. I extracted about 70 shows from a full 120Gig PVR drive this weekend. Have sterilized about half so far of the commercial-interuption-plague. My trackpoint finger is really sore.

thanks

[phd]

Also you also might want to try customizing the keyboard commands for editing. Once you get comfortable with the keyboard commands, editing goes really fast and helps to reduce RTS fatigue using the mouse.

[DanR]

johnny,

You must be reading our minds. This is the next major feature we are working on. You'll start to see betas on this by November and a release by the end of the year (hopefully). In the meantime, theres an open source program that you might be interested in. It will scan your video and create a a file of suspected commercials. There's also a program somewhere that can convert it into a VideoReDo project file.

More info at these links:

http://www.mythtv.org/

http://forums.freytechnologies.com/forums/showthread.php?t=6654

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the info. That is great to hear it may be just down the road in video redo. What i want to figure out now is some crafty way to force the fcc to require a clearly detectable marker be appended to the end and beginning of program video stream. Maybe someway i could tie it in with war on terror, as a defense against radical muslims hijaking the video stream and launching an attack direct to our living rooms, or something like that. I still have some more work to do on that one, can't use a tie in to WMD's already been done, nobody would believe that........

[DanR]

That's a good one. :)

I've read some academic papers on content-based commercial detection. This is where a program looks at the actual picture rather then the obvious things like black-frame or logo bug detection. Unfortuneately, the results were not positive. According to these papers the reliability of these techniques was quite poor.