[pkamb]

Watching football this fall, I've been thinking about a little box that sits on my table and mutes the TV whenever an ad comes on.

Not decoding HDMI HDCP or anything, but a webcam + AI or whatever that watches football with me and mutes ads. Similar to plane detection, maybe. Are there any projects like this?

[gosub100]

I wanted to do this too! I'm an "idea man" that doesn,t deliver, though. Here is my feature list:

* auto commercial block using audio fingerprinting and duration, so if it finds the ad, it knows the ad will last 10-15-30-60 seconds.

* frame-slowdown. often ads just show way too many frame jumps in rapid succession. If this is detected, visual mute would freeze one of the frames and only allow a jump after 5-10s.

* visual mute - if the commercial is not identified audibly, have a blur or black box that covers 85% of the center of the screen. you would un-mute it when you recognize your game from the borders.

* logo-blur. OpenCV to recognize most common ad logos and blur or black them

* commercial-over-dub. allow funny joke audio to be played over existing, known commercials. So when they show insurance ads, someone can say "yeah they didn't pay my $40k roof claim because I didn't have hail coverage", right over the insurance logo

* announcer over-dub. This would allow aspiring sports announcers (or comedians) to have their audio played in place of the game audio. This would require some visual sync, which would include a few seconds of delay. I bet there are some really good announcers out there who would love a chance to announce a game. Also some really funny smart-asses , or you could choose a biased announcer who roots with you for YOUR team and disparages the other!

[concerndc1tizen]

Nice idea!

Related:

In Black Mirror, they pause the advertisement when you disable the sound.

So maybe you'll eventually have to use a separate sound system whereby they cannot detect that you're muting it.

Then, they'll track your eyes and require you to watch the screen :)

At which point do you stop consuming?

[notjoemama]

> Then, they'll track your eyes and require you to watch the screen :)

Check out the recent controversy over Activision and Call of Duty. Evidently the game code requires access to your webcam and the company has patents on using your gameplay to train a bot that play like you do, then uses the idle time to make the bot play while you are away. This bulks up the pool of players ensuring you are matched with people resulting in a good experience for you. There's also a patent detecting your emotional state while you view their in game store, possibly for adjusting price to influence you to buy or spend more.

[gruez]

>Evidently the game code requires access to your webcam

Source?

>then uses the idle time to make the bot play while you are away

Surely they're better off using a GPU cluster to do training like every other AI company?

[Alive-in-2025]

What if you don't have a webcam, you can't play the game? I'm skeptical.

[kurikuri]

>”There’s also a patent for detecting emotional state”

What a tragic state of affairs! Computationally detecting human emotion is an open problem in human-computer interaction, and has been for a while now. I wish I had the hubris and audacity to file a process patent which claims to be able to do so.

[AyyEye]

Drink a verification can to continue.

[BrandoElFollito]

In France the first TV program (TF1) now has unskippable ads. Until now you could just start later, get back to the beginning and fast forward the ads. I am not sure how this works if you recorded your program.

I do not watch TV but it was in the news.

[moffkalast]

At some point pirates come along with their own streams offering better service :P

MBAs think they can enshittfy into perpetuity, but eventually people have enough and leave to whatever the competition is.

[mylons]

i'm about to do it myself. the streaming services are just generally putting out shitty content (there's the occasional gem), charging more, and creating more and more walled gardens. it sucks to be a consumer right now other than the "ease" in which you can access these services.

[ge96]

Black mirror haha I think Samsung actually does it.

[nejsjsjsbsb]

Yeah... of course our execs took that Black Mirror course. Don't want to get left behind.

[zachanderson]

"At which point do you stop consuming?"

The tech cultists won't, will always think "urrhurr let's counter this corporate restriction / government regulation with <stupid tech solution #921>.

It's so rewarding to do simpler things in life instead, f.e. growing your own food and not partake in this "more-and-more pervasive tech spread" BS.

[pplante]

I'd settle for a device that just normalized the volume levels, but this would be even better!

[dtgriscom]

In the USA since 2010, there have been standards that prohibit ads being louder than the program material:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_Advertisement_Loudn...

[s0rce]

Nvidia shield can do that, they call it "nighttime listening mode" or something, I leave it on permanently, much better experience.

[tehwebguy]

Here’s a DIY project to make a TV volume limiter, I haven’t done it myself but it looks cool: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1V2I-otdzk

[konraditurbe]

Usually football trasmissions have identifiable elements in the screen, such as the score, the match title, etc... and those are fixed elements that do not appear in ads. For example: https://i.imgur.com/blebca8.png

Or the title bar below. You could do some basic OCR on a Pi, when the team names are readable, keep the volume up, when they are not, disable it.

[Alive-in-2025]

Years ago Microsoft TV had a free 3rd party extension that analyzed the video and skipped the commercials. Amazingly you could see the downloaded video, there wasn't drm on that in the early days. There were several tools like this.

I think you could do this. If you had a web page logged into the same program it could analyze the video. I wonder if people build "video scraping" from web page tv apps, probably some drm blocking thing.

There also used to be subsonic chimes or something simila on the network tv audio to signal to some other server (maybe at the local tv station?) that would know to automatically run a commericial right now.

[d33dd3d3]

Looking at the electric consumption of my 30 closest neighbors using an RTL-SDR, I'm still wondering what I should do with the information.

[tejtm]

only ethical move would be to move your own consumption to when theirs is lowest and not retain any data but your own

[abosherid]

Are the electric readings sent in plaintext or trivially decrypted?

[mh-]

Unencrypted, I'm sure.

I hadn't thought to look for smart meters, but my RTL-SDR (and my Flipper Zero) can pick up all sorts of temperature sensors, etc.

A quick google found this rtlamr project with a number of blog posts about people doing this with it.

https://github.com/bemasher/rtlamr

[rhcom2]

Probably don't even need the webcam, detection via audio seems possible.

[naveen_k]

Perfect timing! I got annoyed by Ads in streaming services and decided to build something to mute the TV when an Ad comes on. Simple vision based system.

I'll post a write up in a few days.

[naveen_k]

FYI, the project it posted here. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42856980

[benhoff]

Rk3588's have HDMI input (I think with hdcp decoding) that you can use v4l2 API. The multiplane API can be a bit tricky, but otherwise somewhat trivial

[savrajsingh]

I have had this exact same idea, it’s a good one. We all hate ads, and muting the audio is all we really need!

[gsich]

Why not, HDCP is only a compliance scheme.

[ideashower]

how about fingerprinting? Not versed in this space but might be worth looking into.