Ok so its a little redundant with tivo having extra fast fast forward but TV ads are known at least in my country to have a higher volume on average than the shows themselves. Digitally recorded shows could be scanned for these higher average volume sections and cut out leaving maybe a 5 second gap on each side

:P wouldn't be hard to get around that. chances of 5 minsish exactly (what ever it is its well defined) of explosions. The explosion, gun, what scenes would still average out to be quieter
-- lostmind, Jun 20 2007

"Watch the latest James Bond film with none of those noisy explosions..."
-- hippo, Jun 20 2007


//have a higher volume on average than the shows themselves// Volume is regulated - there is a maximum that people are allowed to use. To get around this, advertisers use a technique called compression - where the quiet bits in a wave-form are boosted up to much higher levels (making the waveform look altogether more fuzzy compared to before) The peaks of the waveform are still limited to the same levels, there's just a lot more of them, making the resultant noise harder to ignore.

TV shows tend not to use this technique, a) because it's just not necessary, and b) there's a certain loss of fidelity. Admen don't care about that - they just want you to know that xyz product is great, because you're worth it, apparently.

Point being that these compressed, fuzzy waveforms might be easy to recognise using some sort of analysis algorithm (at this point I realise I have no idea what I'm talking about) and continue appropriately...
-- zen_tom, Jun 20 2007


There are advertisement filtering techniques that exist - in fact I think that adverts are tagged as such in some digital TV formats. As such, you could just use these to trigger volume regulation (or as most folk would prefer, to eliminate them altogether).
-- Jinbish, Jun 20 2007


In the UK and Italy it is technically illegal to broadcast adverts at a higher volume than the regular programming.

It is also illegal to have >7% of your total transmission times output as adverts (although the law was penned before the invention of QVC 'infomercials').

There's 2 boring facts for you ..
-- britboy, Jun 20 2007



random, halfbakery