I’m getting tired of the extremely loud ads on that don’t seem to be subject to the old TV broadcasting laws that prevent them from being blasted 10db louder than the actual content. Wondering if there’s stuff out there that would let me take the hdmi stream from my Apple TV or other streaming source, and do ad detection like the olden days so that it could just mute or do volume leveling at least.
I suppose something very basic might just be an hdmi splitter to a rpi with hdmi that’ll detect ads via the black screens or “this ad will over over in 30s” overlays, then send a mute signal over CEC or something to a receiver or TV….but would be nice if it could modify the hdmi signal directly.
Thoughts on what to search for to do something like this?
True….I’m hoping to expand on it to full ad detection and blocking eventually tho.
Ever heard of TiVo? LoCast?
Both were a thing at one point. The first could do almost what you describe, the second did what you’d need to do today to accomplish the same thing.
The first lost the market when HDMI came along, as it couldn’t decrypt HDCP. The second was found to be illegal and shut down, despite being (in my opinion) very obviously fair use (although they were technically rebroadcasting, which is what got them in trouble).
All this to say, if you find a legal way to evade HDCP, whatever you do will likely be deemed illegal anyway. Fine for a GitHub project, not fine for a business venture.
A modern TiVo pretty much what I had in mind. I believe they detected commercials by a couple seconds of blank between shows and commercial breaks. Using ML based object/logo detection might be a modern way to do it.
I hear the way hdmi splitters work is by providing a full hdcp 4k stream to one side and use hdcp fallback to 720p for the other side. That should work sufficiently for identifying an ad or not.
And yeah I didn’t mean a commercial product, more an OSS project that could be useful for hobbyists.