Automating commercial cutting

One of the nice features of mythtv is that it can do commercial detection, and from that, build a cutlist. My biggest problem, and what kept me from using this feature was that I thought you had to use the user interface to do this. Alas, I have found that indeed there is a command line way to generate the cutlist. Using mythcommflag -f <filename> you can create the commercial flags, the coming back and using mythcommflag --blanks -f give me the cutlist.

Breaks (computed using only blank frame detection)

 13090 : 4 (00:07:16.10) (436)

 18678 : 5 (00:10:22.18) (622)

 35104 : 4 (00:19:30.04) (1170)

 41431 : 5 (00:23:01.01) (1381)

 51877 : 4 (00:28:49.07) (1729)

 52374 : 5 (00:29:05.24) (1745)

 53651 : 4 (00:29:48.11) (1788)

 65357 : 5 (00:36:18.17) (2178)

 78320 : 4 (00:43:30.20) (2610)

 85881 : 5 (00:47:42.21) (2862)

100991 : 4 (00:56:06.11) (3366)

107762 : 5 (00:59:52.02) (3592)

The first column is the frame number (useful for avidemux), the second column is the 4:cut out 5:cut in column, the third column is the timecode (useful for ProjectX) and the fourth column is seconds (useful for mplayer).

Some simple perl scripting, and we have a cutlist that can be used for avidemux, or as an EDL (edit decision list) for mplayer.