Television adverts (aka TV commercials) can be so annoying and insult your intelligence. Especially when they repeat so much. Ideally (IMO) the audio is the most offensive as you can always just look away from the video. So my idea is to audio monitor the TV audio while you are watching. The PC digitizes the TV's audio out. You have to press a keyboard or mouse button to tag or identify when an advert starts and when you feel the PC got enough data to tag or identify it later. So yes it well be a long teaching gap before it will be an effective gadget. But TV adverts rarely change the content that much over time, so the tag database should be current for a long time.

The PC looks at the peaks and valleys in the audio signal and tries to generate numerical weighting for the signal to give that audio it's own distinctive digital signature or tag. Slowly you will build a tag database of advert audio signatures or tags.

The final product would listen to your favorite TV show or movie, it sample digitizes this feed too, but deletes it automatically after a complete digital comparison to your slowly building tag database of advert signatures tags. When a signature or tag hit occurs it mutes the audio via an audio gate. Sampling continues. If it doesn't have another tag hit, it automatically un-mutes audio after 3 minutes, the average length of an American commercial advert break, however some have been known to go 5 minutes or more. You can do a audio mute manual over-ride if you see the movie is back on. Sampling continues ad-infinitum until you shut it down for the day. You can also tag adverts when in this mode too.

Another monitoring method that can somehow be worked into the audio-tag method above is CLOSED CAPTION monitoring. You will need a special device to capture closed captioning to text for the PC to monitor. Ideally closed captioning is in all UPPER-CASE for your desired movie or TV show. However, there is no standardization and some producers are changing to mixed case captioning like this: "Hello My name is Joe Blow." instead of "HELLO MY NAME IS JOE BLOW."

The adverts tend to be ALL in mixed case. But sometimes they throw in an unexpected curve ball and confuse the issue with all UPPER-CASE too. So my idea might get thwarted a bit. But not if the audio-tag method was some how embedded or mixed with this method.

My closed caption method samples all ASCII characters in a sentence. If the percentage of ASCII character codes is like 90% upper-case characters you are probably in non-advert mode. However, if that number is less than 90% with mostly mixed case character codes, then you are likely into an advert. If this mode is detected it mutes the audio until the sampling detects 90% or more closed caption as UPPER-CASE. This can easily be done in JavaScript for a browser.

I'm still not sure any of this will work. However, I know that if it does it will help the mental health of many people! Imagine an advert-free world! No not really, but what a start! I welcome any team members who want to help me think this through...

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NEW IDEA 07-Sept-2016


RESEMBE.JS https://github.com/Huddle/Resemble.js