[robmiller]

I wonder if you could repurpose the mythflagcommercials process from MythTV to do this. It has a variety of methods to detect commercial breaks.

[Zombieball]

This came to mind as well great suggestion.

I haven’t used MythTV in years but I remember it being quite decent at commercial detection. Sometimes it missed the boundary between show and commercial by 1-2s, but otherwise was great.

(I bet they check for volume changes as one of the algorithms)

[upofadown]

The big problem with MythTV commercial detection is that transitions that fool the algorithm into cutting off some of the desired content will almost always fool you too. It's fairly rare, but you might not even realize that it happened, only that the plot seems disjointed or incomplete.

I suspect that other commercial skipping systems would have the same problem.