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?
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!
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
I recommend to not show dates as it can easily help triangulate your location of where this Pi is running, and with the internet crowd, doxxing yourself is never a good idea.
From the regular images, probably not a lot. But if you see a plane crossing in front of the moon or the sun, you could determine a ground track of the shadow of the plane. If you get that with two different planes, you probably have a pretty accurate position (a few hundred meters). Combined with the image of the setup, showing a balcony, someone could probably find the exact location.
If you know the flight and the date and time you can easily pinpoint exactly where the plane was and where it was heading. Not incredibly challenging at that point to narrow in on roughly where the photos were taken from.
Depends on how far from the airport you are, and the accuracy of the timestamp. If you have accurate-to-the-second timestamps and you're within maybe 10km of the airport I think you could get down to a neighborhood pretty easily.
You know roughly the perspective that the camera sees the plane from, so you take the plane position at that timestamp and project that perspective line down onto the ground. The higher the plane, the more error there is with estimating the observation axis, so the less accurate this gets.
Really cool. I've considered doing something similar for alerting me of things seen in the air but without a transponder turned on. Good tip about the birds, I wouldn't have anticipated that ha.
Aside, the way air travel still happens out in the open in terms of communications data has a real early Internet vibe to me.
I'm kind of surprised that they would park it next to other planes like that. Especially with what appears to be no ground troops surrounding the plane.
>I'm kind of surprised that they would park it next to other planes like that
The extreme zoom of the camera makes everything look close together. In reality it's probably quite far from most other planes.
>Especially with what appears to be no ground troops surrounding the plane.
Why would you have them stand outside to guard the plane when the airport is already fenced off, and has surveillance/security? Even if they do need people guarding it, it doesn't make sense to stand outside. Waiting inside or in a nearby SUV would be much more comfortable for the guards.
This is great. So I’ve thought of doing something slightly similar but with a raspberry Pi and camera to identify if there is a free parking space right outside our house (we live in a terraced house with no driveway)
I think this has been done for public places. A lazy approach (not using ML) is cropping/contour finding, then masking (opencv) against an empty parking lot, so if something is there like a car, would change the result.
The black parking lot would change in shade/hue so have to account for a range.
Thanks for the reply. Yeh I’m sure something like this exists. I could probably just mask out the area around the space o lab the streets outside our house and then send a notification when it becomes available.
The complexity maybe comes in in identifying our cars parked there vs someone else’s, so maybe I need number plate recognition. However my camera would be top down so likely no number plate would be visible.
Given that drone warfare is now a thing this seems like it could be useful as the basis of a personal drone detection and warning kit that soldiers could wear over their helmet to spot drones and give say an audible warning in the soldiers ears that lets the soldier locate the drone direction and maybe azimuth with pitch - lower frequency for a low drone and high for one more overhead. Not sure if such a thing already exists. That and a shotgun would be a reasonable defense.
Was thinking of some recent videos where a small drone closes right up to an individual soldier and explodes - assuming those aren't AI generated. But I expect there will be drone hunting drones and drone dogfights will be a thing.
Haha, I'm working on fixing that. One of my ideas is to run inference again on an image to check if it has any birds. If yes, reject the image.
It's a really cool time to be checking right now! All commercial flights are grounded in Delhi for Republic Day celebrations so I'm able to see images of Air Force planes!
Readit News
My toddler loves planes, so I built her a radar (November 2023) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38435908
My toddler still loves planes, so I upgraded her radar (January 2024) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39094288
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?
* 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!
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?
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.
I do not watch TV but it was in the news.
MBAs think they can enshittfy into perpetuity, but eventually people have enough and leave to whatever the competition is.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_Advertisement_Loudn...
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.
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.
I'll post a write up in a few days.
You know roughly the perspective that the camera sees the plane from, so you take the plane position at that timestamp and project that perspective line down onto the ground. The higher the plane, the more error there is with estimating the observation axis, so the less accurate this gets.
Deleted Comment
Aside, the way air travel still happens out in the open in terms of communications data has a real early Internet vibe to me.
this person has some sort of OpenCV setup from a high-rise view. (bonus: Air Force One is currently there)
The extreme zoom of the camera makes everything look close together. In reality it's probably quite far from most other planes.
>Especially with what appears to be no ground troops surrounding the plane.
Why would you have them stand outside to guard the plane when the airport is already fenced off, and has surveillance/security? Even if they do need people guarding it, it doesn't make sense to stand outside. Waiting inside or in a nearby SUV would be much more comfortable for the guards.
Dead Comment
The black parking lot would change in shade/hue so have to account for a range.
The complexity maybe comes in in identifying our cars parked there vs someone else’s, so maybe I need number plate recognition. However my camera would be top down so likely no number plate would be visible.
Any thoughts/recommendations are helpful
This plane suspiciously looks like a bird though: https://i.imgur.com/cUdnZTN.png
It's a really cool time to be checking right now! All commercial flights are grounded in Delhi for Republic Day celebrations so I'm able to see images of Air Force planes!