TV-ad signal?

We have a TV zapper/doinker/remote thingy. It has to be pointing just in the right direction to work. I like to have it in my hand when watching channels that carry adverts, so that I can cancel the sound during adverts. I resent the invasions of privacy which adverts are, particularly their idiotic advertising patter. I am very lazy, and I like the idea of being able to modify the TV so that it switches sound off automatically when adverts come on. Is that possible? Is there a signal to signify the beginning and end of an advert? Somebody could make a penny out of such a convenience.

You’ll know that film reel-changes have a mark in the frame in an inconspicuous corner to signal the cue visually.

I seem to remember that TV is slightly more sophisticated and has a visual pattern signal just outside the “frame” to the top which you can see if you make your picture smaller than the screen.

It would be detecting that, I think, which could be used for such a device, but I may still be mentally in the 1950s.

I remember our street lights used to be activated by an audio tone superimposed on the mains which could be heard on a badly-adjusted sound device or, in my case, a mains-driven electromagnetic speaker running from badly-smoothed DC.

Then there were the tuned resonance switches used for remotely-controlling heavy loads in the olden days.

I don’t think a penny will suffice for a convenience any longer.

Thanks. That sounds hopeful.

I don’t think a penny will suffice for a convenience any longer.

I am showing my age.

Is there a signal to signify the beginning and end of an advert? Somebody could make a penny out of such a convenience.

I rarely watch anything ‘live broadcast’. I record pretty much everything and then watch about 10 minutes later. Usually enough to then fast forward past the adverts. Something which stopped the fast forward at the end of the ads would get my vote and a lot more than a penny.

With a small number of analogue broadcast channels, there was scope for someone to provide an ‘advert/commercial in progress’ signal for each of the few channels that were then transmitted. But the facility to have an always-on internet connection arrived after the proliferation of channels.

I haven’t watched live TV in years now but isn’t that exactly what the little black and white “ticker” was on ITV and C4? In the top right hand corner of the screen?

There was, briefly, a signal transmitted via teletext that told smart video recorders when to pause and restart to skip recording adverts.

Unfortunately, you know how Google and Facebook are worth hundreds of billions? It’s because however many pennies you can come up with to skip adverts, advertisers can come up with orders of magnitude more pennies to have them shown. That’s why modern apps and websites are stuffed full of adverts, in the latter case often going out of their way to break site usability unless you accept running untrusted and untrustworthy code of unknown provenance in your browser.
It’s why some manufacturers (Lenovo, apparently) feel that it is acceptable to use the laptop you purchased to show you adverts that you cannot disable. It’s why more and more your productivity sinks using free apps as your workflow is interrupted with a full screen video advert (with sound) that you are forced to watch X seconds of prior to dismissing it.

They’re scum and parasites and a pox on all their houses, but they’re far richer than us, and the problem is only going to get worse in order to prop up the fact that this entire trillion dollar industry is built on false premises.

Unfortunately, you know how Google and Facebook are worth hundreds of billions? It’s because however many pennies you can come up with to skip adverts, advertisers can come up with orders of magnitude more pennies to have them shown

Check out the between music content of various digital radio stations – you can download an app¹ for your smartphone, laptop etc which will allow you to skip the adverts and a selected number of tracks² to improve your experience.

¹ The app is a free trial period version – yup, they are going to make you pay to not listen to the adverts

Something which stopped the fast forward at the end of the ads would get my vote and a lot more than a penny.

My DVR has a configurable skip forward and back buttons which I’ve set at 60 and 15 seconds. Most adverts are 30 seconds long and advert breaks on Channel 4 (the only commercial station I watch) are 4 minutes. So it’s 4 forward skips over most breaks but back 2 if they are shorter.

I have a Panasonic DVR. Pressing the Chapter jump button moves to the end of the adverts.

I know it’s not the same thing IE: automatically stopping them, but the way I do it is as follows:

All my TV set’s are “Vestel Opera TV” smart TV sets, with built in recording to USB.

Unfortunately, the recording on the USB, is usually encrypted, so the first thing I had to do was break in to the system, so I could alter the OS configuration on it.

On these TV’s there is generally a 5v TTL logic console on pins 15 & 12 of the VGA input socket, or on the “data” lines (10,12 & 14 I think) on the Scart socket.

Using a one of those cheap microcontroller UARTS and poking a couple of dupont wires into the socket usually gets you access to it, which you then used the various commands available to alter the TV configuration (Too much to explain here, but if anyone wants details feel free to contact me off thread)

The alterations to the config, essentially, allow you to turn off the encryption on the recording side of things, so that the recording is made as a pure unencrypted TS stream.

Since TS streams are keyframed with mpeg P & B frames, you can usually grab the TS file off the USB key chain, then using an application such as “project X” (A TS/Video analyzer written in Java), and using keyframe navigation mode, rather than single frame navigation, you can generally hit slap bang on the frame where the stream switches from program to ad-break.

I can skip through and mark out the start & end of each “watchable” chunk in the TS file, quite easily and in less than 5 mins too.

I then save out a “definition file” that lists the cut points and drop the TS file & cutlist into a folder on an old linux box, where I have a script monitoring said folder.

The script runs a couple of apps automatically for me, one of which is the afore mentioned “Project X” in command line mode, along with tools such as “Subtitle Edit” and “Tesseract”.

Prj X, cuts the ad’s out of the video segments, saving a snippet of TS for each watchable part. As well as this, it also separates out the various TS streams such as subtitle & alternative audio streams.

Subtitle edit is then run on the subtitle stream parts, this extracts the subtitle bitmaps, and passes them to Tesseract for OCR, which are all then collated, time stamped and saved as an “srt” text-based subtitle file.

Finally, ffmpeg is run on the individual segments, and primary audio stream, to create a one-piece mp4 file with single audio track.

This single file is then copied to my “TV Programs” share on my NAS-Box, where plex automatically picks it up on a refresh.

Just recently, I’ve even managed to automate things a little further, by building a “Smart USB” thumb drive using a raspberry PI zero w. The zero is programmed at boot to appear to the TV set as if it was a USB thumb drive. The firmware on the SD card however, mounts the block device file as a loop device, and samba exposes it as a CIFS share on the wifi interface. Now when the TV records a program, my script monitors the files until they are closed, then it makes a copy of them to my “editing” folder, where I simply do the manual step of finding the cut marks. I then save the cut-file, and about 20 minutes later it appears in my Plex media server ready to be watched, completely ad-free.

So far, I’ve managed to hack 2 of the 3 TV sets I have, the 3rd one despite being an older revision than the 2 I’ve succeeded, seems to have some changes in it’s internal OS that are different to the other 2, so I have not yet succeeded in getting that one to record unencrypted to the USB.

That 3rd one however is in the living room, and has a sky+ box connected to it, which I’ve also figured out how to break into the DLNA interface on it, and built a rest interface to talk to it, so I can easily schedule, delete & otherwise manage my recordings from.

I’ve not done any work on the system for a while, but I still have intentions to build a “Smart USB” device for the second TV, so that can be mostly automated, and build an remote controlled HDMI switch, so I can connect an HDMI 1080p frame grabber to the back of the Sky+ box, allowing me to flick the switch remotely when no-one’s using it, and play back recordings from the box into the frame grabber for recording and editing that way.

Is the above some sort of spam?

For the clear to air channels, I use a simple digital satellite receiver, wang a USB device into it (usually a µSD card via reader) and hit Record. The thing dumps the entire TS stream to media. Which includes alternative soundtracks (the BBC often does audio described) as well as subtitles.
The result is playable on my phone using SMPlayer or VLC (etc).

Since you’re playing back non-live, it’s a simple keypress or screen swipe to skip over the adverts. Plus one can pause at any time for tea, pee, and Maltesers (as is necessary).

Note that you’ll need fast reliable media. An hour of BBC HD can be 1-2½GB.

That said, I think the last time I had it running was last winter. Eurovision was a live stream on YouTube (yay! no inane commentary!) and the rest is Netflix and Prime Video.

Plus one can pause at any time for tea, pee, and Maltesers (as is necessary)

Hand sanitisation optional in that sequence ??

Unless one somehow failed kindergarten, hand sanitisation is fully automatic and doesn’t need to be pointed out or otherwise highlighted.

That Covid caused shops to run out of soap is, like, the most disgusting thing imaginable. So everybody ran out to buy soap…..okay, and what were you all doing before?

Nope not spam at all Rick, that’s genuinely how I have things set up. Have done for a few years now, except for the cut-list marking, everything is pretty much automatic, I switch on the TV, go to the guide, select the program I want to record, put the TV back into standby and shortly after the program has aired, it’s ready for me to make a cut-list.