[MPlayer-users] Re: Commercial detection

[rbtq7ol02 at sneakemail.com]

Just a thought on commercial detection...  it's probably not practical at 
encode time, but what about a filter along the lines of cropdetect?  Perhaps 
the filter could take a filename as a parameter and output an EDL marking all 
of the points  where there's a fade to black.  That would be a good starting 
place, and it should be fairly easy from there to edit it to be correct.  To 
be a bit smarter, it could match groups of fades that are ~30sec or ~60sec 
apart, which would very likely be commercials.  2min of video after such a 
group, it could output a line to the EDL to cut the whole group.  I'd expect 
detection to be reasonably reliable this way.  It could be made more reliable 
by checking audio as well, but I'm guessing it's going to very, very hard to 
do that...

Andrew