I swear, if you want to make a million dollars overnight, invent an apparatus that will automatically mute the TV when commercials come on and then unmute when your show comes back on.

If I ever get to meet Mike Lindell it'll take all I have to not punch him in the nose.

The capability of such technology that one could set in the "settings" menu of a TV has existed for years and should be integrated in every one sold.

Even a simple "+/-" setting with x% above, below or equal to the set volume, (and no matter what the "broadcast as recorded" it would throttle instantly to your choice.

It would be no different (a solution), than the display auto adjusting the brightness, as most already do.

I'd be happy to snatch HisPillow from in front of his face when you go to swing.

Medicare commercials after December 7 ??
Every hour on just about every channel.
Do TV's have 9 lives?

Two scenarios and two sets of problems:

[A] The constraining of sudden jumps in volume from commercials that are louder than the program you care about and seem to *jump out* at you when they play the commercial. This is similar to the desire to normalize the dialogue (make it louder) and reduce the relative volume of the explosions and such.

These two related scenarios are trivially easy to solve with Hardware that has existed for decades, especially in 2ch/Stereo systems rather than Surround Sound, and is generally reserved for musicians and studios and whatnot, and the name of that solution is ... Compression and Brick Wall Limiting.

Setting aside the aesthetic differences between traditional TVs and HiFi gear and Studio gear, you could, right now, hook up most any 19" rack mount Stereo Compressor/Limiter inline on the stereo audio cables between most any TV and most any Receiver, dial it in, and like magic... the commercials are never louder than the show, the dialogue is relatively louder, explosions relatively quiter, etc.

Such Compressors/Limiters range from $100s/ea to $1000s each, and audio just passes though, and is affected in realtime. Easy as pie, handsoff once setup, and so on.


[B] The auto detection of commercials which then auto mutes things for you.

Theoretically possible, but many factors make it inconsistent and impractical, by design, because they don't want you doing this. To make it possible there needs to be a clear and consistent and measurable difference between the relative volumes of the Shows/Films/news vs the Commercials (factoring in dynamic range), and notably the commerical would have to be louder than the loudest explosion or whatever of the show, and it rarely is. The fuckers make the commercials have inconsistent volumes, too, to confound things. They'd either need to insert a clear marker/carrier signal of some sort that's detectable or use consistent levels across all shows, films, and commercials, which they dont. Else, it couldn't tell the difference between gunfire and the start of a commercial and so on.

Option [A] above is never farther away than n-number of hardware compressor/limiter channels depending on how many audio channels you have, 2ch vs 5.1 vs 7.1, etc.

Just for you, Gustofer, I'll take a measly half million and I will hook you up...

Or for a few hundred to a few grand, anyone can do this themselves with some research and effort. Compression and Limiting are old concepts, well understood, and in use at broadcast and audio facilities and home studios worldwide.

Most folks unknowingly paint themselves into corners with soundbars, BT audio, big comlicated hifi receivers with many channels, etc, rather than discrete components like receivers and traditional amplifiers, etc, where there's simply no place to insert a Compressor/Limiter inline. One needs access to the line level audio (RCA, 1/4", etc) between the source and amplifier(s) for every channel you want to compress/limit or at least a stereo pair before the big-receiver's input from the TV or cablebox/etc so that the compression/limiting happens once for n-surround channels downstream in the big receiver.

Technically software solutions exist too, but it's not necessarily easier or cheaper and adds in a need for a computer to process things and the associated audio interfaces and latency and more so I've just skipped all that, here. A built in TV app *could* do it, if they inserted some carrier signal to denote commercials, but they won't, short of legislation forcing the advertising industry to comply, and fat fucking chance there.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: 46and2,

Easy, don’t watch commercial television unless it’s prerecorded and you can FF through the herd commercials. I haven’t watched commercial television in over 20 years. The only LOUD scenes that happen here are when LFE kicks in.

They already time-drift commercials to make it harder to skip them when setting up scheduled recordings, and the show/film start times will actually begin at 11:07am instead of 11am, and the like, and commercials don't occur on a fixed-enough schedule to avoid via scheduling either, very much on purpose, to make these very things difficult.

They want your eyeballs/ears and those sweet sweet advertising $$$$.

But, a single stereo compressor/limiter will help you control such things better.

I'll have to source a link/example later, but I will.

I am going back many years for this -- I had a friend who was a tech guy at a large radio station. He told me that there was a signal that was transmitted on large network systems to indicate the start of a commercial. This was used to allow stations to insert local commercials in place of the national commercial.

He made a home-built device for his personal radio that detected this signal and lowered the volume to an almost inaudible level for the duration of the commercial.

It was more than fifty years ago that he demonstrated this for me, so I'm a bit fuzzy on details, but I do remember him showing it to me, and it worked.

quote:

Easy, don’t watch commercial television unless it’s prerecorded and you can FF through the herd commercials.

Bingo

quote:

Originally posted by Prefontaine:
Easy, don’t watch commercial television unless it’s prerecorded and you can FF through the herd commercials.

Well, I've always kept the TV on while home as background noise if nothing else. For years it was FNC, and since I can't stand many of their hosts (Neil Cavuto and Sean Hannity can hold hands and jump off a cliff for all I care...and take Dana Perino with them), it's been Newsmax for the past year or so.

Problem is, Newsmax appears to be entirely funded by Mike Lindell and the Balance of Nature folks. There are nearly more commercials from those two outfits than there is news content.

Another business recommendation from someone who doesn't know dick about business except from a consumer standpoint: It's not a good idea to piss off the potential consumer! Neither of those companies will ever get a dime from me.

Most all of my prime time content is recorded though and I do FF through them. It's the only way I could tolerate them.

I have such a device. It's called a "wife."

Auto volume leveling exists on many TVs. I've seen it as a feature on TVs over 10 years ago.

If you want TV as commercial free background viewing, you can get a YouTube Premium account and just have countless hours of YouTube playing (commercial free) from your favorite subscribed channels. The same can be done with Netflix or any other subscription based streaming service.

There are some folks out there in TV Land offering to help me if my carrot is.... Bent!

My beef is the fact, that they get away with editing out parts of the program, so they can squeeze in more of Joe Namath and JJ Walker.

I keep Fox News on in the background, often when using my computer, so I'm not seeing the TV, only listening.

And I swear it's the same few commercial jingles over and over and over. I'm pretty sure a lot of them are locally programmed and not on the national feed. The My Pillow ads have declined, but I get a lot of Balance of Nature ads. So you take a fruit or vegetable and freeze dry it into powder, then put the powder in a pill, and expect me to believe the pill is equivalent to the real thing? What is this the 1950's/60's?

The funny thing is sometimes the jingles and music don't tell you anything about the company or product/service.

There is a Sirius XM Holiday commercial and I swear I can't understand any of the lyrics of the jingle. I didn't even know what the commercial was for until I actually saw it. I thought it was some kind of "Hakuna-Matada" native gibberish on some kind of "Christmas in the 3rd world" public service announcement.

And no, I will not buy anything in any of these ads. And the ads make me even less likely on the odd chance I had some other reason to consider then.

quote:

I have such a device. It's called a "wife."

Same here, my wife mutes the sound, but sometimes she switches to QVC which is worse than commercials.