Editing out commercials?

[IGx89]

Is there any program designed to losslessly edit out commercials from WMV files? AsfCut can losslessly cut up a WMV file, but it's a pain to have to enter in all the starting and stopping times. If there's no free program to expediate the identifying and editing out of commercials, then I'll probably make my own. I've been doing some research, and it should be relatively easy to make a program to quickly semi-automatically edit out commericals and schedule AsfCut to run during the night.

[Soundman]

Hello.

Have you determined for sure that Microsoft Windows Movie Maker cannot do it losslessly? It's a free download.

You might also check out freeware VirtualDub at sourceforge. It can do several formats losslessly, but I don't whether WMV is one of them. I kinda doubt it, but, you might use it as a starting point to writing your own, since it is open source and has a plug-in architecture. At least all the GUI work would already be done for you.

BTW, if you do put something together, be sure to share it. I would be interested, especially if it is lightning fast.

[IGx89]

If WMM2 can, I haven't found out how yet. VirtualDub is also out of the question: "Some online searching turned up a promising freeware product called VirtualDub (http://virtualdub.sourceforge.net). VirtualDub has some amazing capabilities, but WMV import isn't one of them—thanks to Microsoft" (PCMag).

Also, even if those programs could, they'd still take a while to trim commercials out of videos. My program at a minimum will let one jump forward 60 seconds and back 10 seconds, and press the spacebar when they reach commercials to tell the program to edit them out. Once the user has identified the sections to cut out, it will schedule AsfCut to run either right away or sometime in the night with those values. Though, I'm hoping to be able to get my program to automatically jump to parts where commercials begin (using an algorithm) so the user just has to press "search", "begin trim", "search", "end trim", "search", "begin trim", etc...

I could get this program done in a week if I had the time, but it'll probably take longer because of school and two other ongoing programming projects I have.

[Yang]

If you are looking for an algorithm for detecting scene changes in a mpeg stream, I found this paper discussing two methods.

The other menthod, which is what I think mythTV uses, is looking for "blank" frames and then looking in ~30 second intervals for the end of the commercial block.

[dragin33]

i know this probably doesn't help your situation but i found that MPEG2VCR is very good and very fast at editing out commercials in MPEG2 files. Don't know if it does wmv... i don't think so.

[Rich A]

Originally posted by dragin33
i know this probably doesn't help your situation but i found that MPEG2VCR is very good and very fast at editing out commercials in MPEG2 files. Don't know if it does wmv... i don't think so.

Womble is an Mpeg only editor.

[IGx89]

To detect commercials, I'm planning on something similar to what Myth uses; I'll calculate the percentage of black in the screen, and look for fades and/or periods of just black. I'm planning on having a number of values to customize though, and I might even allow people to make plugin dlls to add different forms of detecting commercials. I'm not counting on my method to be fool-proof, though; just to substantially lessen the number of times the user has to press "advance forward 60 seconds". My goal is to allow the user to edit out commercials from a 30-minute show in <1 minute of user supervision (the actual cutting of the video will be done automatically at a time set by the user).

I already have my program (a modified DPlay sample program from the WM Format SDK) grabbing bitmaps from WMV files, so any possible roadblocks should be out of the way (except, of course, if Microsoft orders me to stop development of my program, which I think is highly unlikely. But, if that happens, that will be after I've made a working version ).

[IGx89]

MPEG2VCR also costs; my program will be donation-ware™

[Yang]

Sweet... If you need a tester, I'm available. I'd like to archive some of the things I've recorded, but not until I remove the commercials.

[Rich A]

I've been at the commercial cutting thing for a few years now. Mostly I work in the Mpeg format. (Using Womble)

Today it is more difficult than ever to automatically find start and stop points when dealing with commerical TV. In order to squeeze every last second of available time for commercial content the networks are cutting them very close. In fact there are some stations that have "no" black or fade to black at all.

IE. Frame number 1999 is the movie and the very next frame (# 2000) is the commercial. Even worse, I have a local station that actually does a "fade/merge" into the movie from a commercial. There is actually a few frames with over-lapping video from both the movie and the commercial. That one really frosts me.

I own a few of those ReplayTV boxes and one of them is the model that had commercial skip. It surprised me how well it works, but it always gets a few frames you don't want, one way or the other and does miss some entirely. Still it's about 90 percent on the good side. Good luck. A WM format frame accurate editor with auto commercial processing would be well received I'm sure.

[Soundman]

IGx89,

Your project sounds very interesting. I would love to test it out when you get far enough along.

Soundman

[berangkat]

Did anything ever come out of this discussion?

[IGx89]

IGCutter, but it doesn't do any commercial detection itself: it reads BTV's SmartSkip info (if it exists) and allows you to add/change/remove the cut points and then actually (quickly, without recompression) remove the cut sections from the video file.

It hasn't been updated for a while, but it still does the job and there's even a version floating around that can edit AVI clips.

[Mistergq]

Have you tried Videoredo? The best commercial detection I've seen is videoredo. I am not sure if it works with WMV and its not donation ware, but its worth the price.

[MickP]

This is kind of being discussed atm here.

Mick.