Couple of ideas from a PVR addict :)

[BerkA]

Does anyone have a link to MPEG2 stream information? I looked around, but I coudn't find enough detail. The standards publications are not free; the prices are a little steep for me.

I'd like to be able to take some MPG files and extract the frame number, frame size, and frame type out of them. The program I found (above) does this, but I couldn't get the necessary information out of the binary file it generates.

[bitter_old_man]

These might help.

MPEG Headers Quick Reference
MPEG-2 FAQ
A few things in this directory

Barry

[krutaw]

Quote[/b] (sub @ April 24 2004,18:38)]I dont think we'd skip automatically but rather allow you to press the skip button to jump to the next known cut point.

That would still rock!  I can't tell you how many times I've cussed at the screen while I hit fast forward. hehe

Btw, thnks again for all your hard work sub!

[davisj36]

Very interesting... I would love to see this happen as well.

[colin]

Can we define what information is required for a cut point/chapter point? I mean could we get GBPVR to the point whereby if an mpeg file has an associated file with the ext. ,say .cp, with a list of cut points defined in time_t we could at least set this up manually until a plugin is written to automatically determin cut points?

It would be very simple to use an mpeg program to get a list of cut points and put them into a file for now as a first step.

Also, get a hold of the src for cuttermaran. I believe this is written in C# and its GPL'ed, so this would be a good place to start on how to work with mpeg files. I plant to get a hold of this soon. And remember, if you use GPL code, then your plugin must be GPL'ed as well.

Cheers,
Colin.

[dito]

Hmm... I live in Sweden... Some american (U.S) shows have too many commercial spots so the providers here in Sweden don't cut everytime they go to commercial in the U.S this still makes the little black part of frames even though the show continues... Having a automatic cutting tool would in this case cut some of the show out... That's why I think cutting points would be the best solution...

Best regards!

[sub]

Colin, it would be relatively easy to include this functionality in the core playback code, but I thought I'd wait until it looks like someone is actually going to use it (instead of diverting development effort from other things).

As soon as someone comes up with a mechanism for listing the skip points, send me an example file and I'll support it in the next release. The file should really just be a list of times in seconds where commercials exist. I'd alter GB-PVR to skip to the next/prev time listed.

[CodeMonkey]

I had started down this path but had a hard drive crash that killed what I had done.  It wasn't that much, but I did have a file layout defined:

GBPVR Commercial Break    // sanity checker
1.0                                // for version number check in case we change formats
n                                  // number of breaks
xxxxxxxxx|yyyyy             // start frame number   delimiter number of frames  (repeated n times)

Wouldn't frame numbers be better to use than seconds?

The file naming convention would be the same filename as the saved mpeg file, but with the extention of .gcb (GBPVR Commercial Break). So if the recording was abcdef12345.mpg, the 'cut file' would be abcdef12345.gcb.

[colin]

Frame numbers would be better for accuracy but I was wondering what information Sub would need to be able to skip to different parts in the mpg.

@CodeMonkey: the format you are suggesting looks fine, I assume the delimeter is the number of frames to the end of the commercials?

So we should wrap this up in a "nice" xml format to be consistent. Versioning is a good idea. Reminds me to much of interface designs in work though

@Sub: I didn't intend for you to get distracted from other things Though its of benefit to know whether its better to give you frame numbers or times for cut points.

Colin.

[CodeMonkey]

Quote[/b] (colin @ May 25 2004,07:31)]Frame numbers would be better for accuracy but I was wondering what information Sub would need to be able to skip to different parts in the mpg.

@CodeMonkey: the format you are suggesting looks fine, I assume the delimeter is the number of frames to the end of the commercials?

So we should wrap this up in a "nice" xml format to be consistent.  Versioning is a good idea.  Reminds me to much of interface designs in work though

@Sub: I didn't intend for you to get distracted from other things Though its of benefit to know whether its better to give you frame numbers or times for cut points.

Colin.

I would assume frame numbers would be easier to jump to than times.

Delimiter was just the '|' character.  One example of a cut point would be:

1000|50

which would indicate at frame 1000 there was a commercial detected that was 50 frames long.

We could put it in xml format I suppose.  But this is meant for gbpvr only, so I think the only thing xml buys us in this case is making the file larger.  But I wouldn't be violently opposed to that if you felt there was value somehow.

Can someone with 'god' powers please strip out all these commercial skipping posts and create a new thread in the developers area please