[dervari]

Ok, so I'm watching Serinity that was DVRed back on 10/4/2011. All the commercials seem to be from that time, which is expected. However, I noticed a commercial that is for a Summer Special on PPV movies where you save $10 when purchasing 4 PPVs by July 7. All the movies mentioned were 2012 released.

How in the heck did this commercial get into a recording from 2011, months before these movies were even released to the theaters???

Yes, I did go back for a sanity check. The movies included Waderlust and Wrath of the Titans. They all had a 2012 copyright notice during the trailers.

 

[Shades228]

Probably used the same ID so when it got to that inserted commercial it just pulled up the one with that ID that was currently stored on the drive.

 

[dervari]

So recorded programs get commercials inserted in real time? Interesting.

 

[Shades228]

That would be the only way for a recording to be modified.

 

[ThomasM]

While some subscription TV providers (DISH) think up ways for subscribers to not be bothered by commercials at all, some (DIRECTV) think up new ways of FORCING subscribers to watch commercials, like blocking the "skip/slip" key or this new innovation described in this thread.

When the day comes that DirecTV DVR's can't skip commercials, they will find a mass exodus of subscribers since that is the PRIMARY reason for paying the premium price for a DVR.

 

[The Merg]

While some subscription TV providers (DISH) think up ways for subscribers to not be bothered by commercials at all, some (DIRECTV) think up new ways of FORCING subscribers to watch commercials, like blocking the "skip/slip" key or this new innovation described in this thread.

When the day comes that DirecTV DVR's can't skip commercials, they will find a mass exodus of subscribers since that is the PRIMARY reason for paying the premium price for a DVR.

Thomas, I know you know better. The issue of slip/skip not working on commercials is a bug and nothing more. As for forcing people to watch commercials, how is replacing old commercials with new ones forcing anyone to watch them. You can just as easily fast forward through the new ones.

- Merg

 

[dpeters11]

While some subscription TV providers (DISH) think up ways for subscribers to not be bothered by commercials at all, some (DIRECTV) think up new ways of FORCING subscribers to watch commercials, like blocking the "skip/slip" key or this new innovation described in this thread.

When the day comes that DirecTV DVR's can't skip commercials, they will find a mass exodus of subscribers since that is the PRIMARY reason for paying the premium price for a DVR.

I don't think I'm that unusual in saying skipping commercials is not the primary reason. Trickplay overall is the second reason behind time shifting.

 

[maartena]

Ok, so I'm watching Serinity that was DVRed back on 10/4/2011. All the commercials seem to be from that time, which is expected. However, I noticed a commercial that is for a Summer Special on PPV movies where you save $10 when purchasing 4 PPVs by July 7. All the movies mentioned were 2012 released.

How in the heck did this commercial get into a recording from 2011, months before these movies were even released to the theaters???

Yes, I did go back for a sanity check. The movies included Waderlust and Wrath of the Titans. They all had a 2012 copyright notice during the trailers.

Okay, bear with me here.... I have a theory. Not sure if this is correct, but this is what I think:

I know they have some sort of push system for local commercials....they have been testing with this for a while, and it might have gone live some time ago. Satellite carriers always had the disadvantage that they couldn't sell local advertisement to national cable channels.

On cable, it is not uncommon to see say..... a commercial for your local BBQ joint on a national channel like USA as they could insert it in the feed.

DirecTV came up with a solution for that. They have some reserved space on your DVR, I believe it is 100 Gb (with 400 Gb for recording), in which they load (via satellite, not via internet) or "push" commercials from time to time for a local commercial. So when a program plays, and it is time for a commercial, at the same time a cable station would see the commercial for the local BBQ joint, you would see it too as it was played from your hard drive where it was pushed at some point.

Now, to your issue.... if this is the case, I believe the commercials probably got a unique identifier assigned to them. A campaign might run for the month of June, and when the campaign is over, that commercial is removed from your drive. It is very well possible that when you record a show with a inserted commercial, it does not record the commercial again on another part of the DVR, but simply points to the existing piece of video already on there. If the campaign ends however, that commercial is also deleted.

It could very well be that if a commercial does not exist (similarly to a local time slot that did not get sold), DirecTV inserts its own commercial. And again, this commercial might have been pushed on to your hard drive at some point. And as such..... it could happen that a NEWER ad is shown on an OLDER show.

For DirecTV ads period, it might be that there is a "always-point-to-the-newest-ad" system or something.

Again, this is a theory.... but since I do know that they have been testing localized commercials with a push system, that might have been the reason.

 

[TomCat]

Thomas, I know you know better. The issue of slip/skip not working on commercials is a bug and nothing more. As for forcing people to watch commercials, how is replacing old commercials with new ones forcing anyone to watch them. You can just as easily fast forward through the new ones.

- Merg

And this is not a bug, which would imply that an approved function of the OS (in this case) somehow failed unexpectedly. Since 30SKIP is not approved or supported, and since savvy software engineers knew beforehand that inserting commercials would break it, nothing is happening unexpectedly, and it does not qualify under the definition of a "bug". It could be that the reason 30SKIP is not approved is because things that they had planned to do, such as insert commercials, would have knowingly broken it. Which they do.

30SKIP works by jumping to a timecode or PST that is "30 seconds worth of GOPs" ahead in the timeline. If the timecode written to the inserted clip is different from that written into the program it is inserted into, which will obviously be the case if that clip is stored on your HDD, 30SKIP can't then locate a timecode/PTS with a value 30 seconds later than what it is reading at the moment you press the button, and so it aborts. Nothing conspiratorial there.

I thought the inserts were done globally at broadcast. Silly me. If they were, a timecode regenerator would fix the problem. Not possible if the clip is already on your HDD.

For 30SKIP to work in this case, the algorithm would have to be amended. Something like "if the TC we are looking for is unavailable, then jump to the first TC that is within 30 seconds of the last good unbroken timecode". That would work, and would jump you to the end of the insert (not really what DTV has in mind for us), but would also imply that if there is any break in TC that the last good known value be stored in a register somewhere so that 30SKIP could default to basing its "30 seconds later" calculation on that.

IOW, the DVR would have to keep track of the running TC, identify that as show TC, and be able to store the last known value whenever there was a break in TC, and use that in the amended 30SKIP algorithm. Lots of CPU cycles dedicated to a thread competing with all the other tasks slow, sluggish, overtasked DVRs are faced with.

Possible; not very likely to be implemented.

 

[TomCat]

Okay, bear with me here.... I have a theory. Not sure if this is correct, but this is what I think:...the commercials probably got a unique identifier assigned to them...It is very well possible that when you record a show with a inserted commercial, it does not record the commercial again on another part of the DVR, but simply points to the existing piece of video already on there....t could happen that a NEWER ad is shown on an OLDER show.

For DirecTV ads period, it might be that there is a "always-point-to-the-newest-ad" system or something.

Again, this is a theory.... but since I do know that they have been testing localized commercials with a push system, that might have been the reason.

All commercials have a unique identifier referred to as an "ISCI" code.

I think your theory is very credible, and this is typically the way things work in digital storage and delivery.

The defining aspect here is "nonlinearity". Videotape, by its nature, has physical media distance separating one moment on the tape from any other moment. A tape transport workflow is considered "linear", because to get from A to B you have to wind thorough all of the other sequential moments in between them.

In comparison, most digital storage mediums other than tape are considered "non-linear", because they do not have that barrier. You can jump from any point within the medium to any other point within the medium instantly, because they are all related by software pointers, and HDDs and optical drives can instantly go wherever we instruct them to within a recording.

Most folks were first exposed to this with CDs and DVDs. "Be kind, rewind" was no longer necessary. You can jump to any track on a CD from anywhere in the CD, and you can jump to chapter points on a DVD instantly from the menu, while on a linear tape you have to wind forward or backward to whatever new point you want to go to.

When video is edited today, it is on a non-linear editing platform like Avid NewsCutter or Apple Final Cut Pro X. Adobe Premiere and iMovie do much the same thing on your laptops or iPads. Instead of copying one piece of media to another so that the edited bits are physically adjacent to each other and can all be played back in order sequentially, all of the media remains exactly where it was imported to, and an EDL, or edit decision list is made which is really just a laundry list of pointers. On playback, the pointers are jumped to sequentially for each new edit point, which simulates that the media is all edited together into a single linear chunk, even though it quite often isn't.

So, when TNT airs Justified, and DTV wants to insert a commercial into the recording on your HDD, at the proper moment it tells the DVR to jump to the pointer that represents the SOM, or start of message for that clip, and it appears to the viewer that the inserted commercial is seamlessly part of the flow of the original program. All due to the non-linear aspect of digital storage.

 

[inkahauts]

And this is not a bug, which would imply that an approved function of the OS (in this case) somehow failed unexpectedly. Since 30SKIP is not approved or supported, and since savvy software engineers knew beforehand that inserting commercials would break it, nothing is happening unexpectedly, and it does not qualify under the definition of a "bug". It could be that the reason 30SKIP is not approved is because things that they had planned to do, such as insert commercials, would have knowingly broken it. Which they do.

30SKIP works by jumping to a timecode or PST that is "30 seconds worth of GOPs" ahead in the timeline. If the timecode written to the inserted clip is different from that written into the program it is inserted into, which will obviously be the case if that clip is stored on your HDD, 30SKIP can't then locate a timecode/PTS with a value 30 seconds later than what it is reading at the moment you press the button, and so it aborts. Nothing conspiratorial there.

I thought the inserts were done globally at broadcast. Silly me. If they were, a timecode regenerator would fix the problem. Not possible if the clip is already on your HDD.

For 30SKIP to work in this case, the algorithm would have to be amended. Something like "if the TC we are looking for is unavailable, then jump to the first TC that is within 30 seconds of the last good unbroken timecode". That would work, and would jump you to the end of the insert (not really what DTV has in mind for us), but would also imply that if there is any break in TC that the last good known value be stored in a register somewhere so that 30SKIP could default to basing its "30 seconds later" calculation on that.

IOW, the DVR would have to keep track of the running TC, identify that as show TC, and be able to store the last known value whenever there was a break in TC, and use that in the amended 30SKIP algorithm. Lots of CPU cycles dedicated to a thread competing with all the other tasks slow, sluggish, overtasked DVRs are faced with.

Possible; not very likely to be implemented.

You can think its on purpose all you want, but since I can have the same exact program recorded on two different dvrs, and have one show the bug on the same commercial that the other doesn't, I will know better.

 

[TomCat]

While some subscription TV providers (DISH) think up ways for subscribers to not be bothered by commercials at all, some (DIRECTV) think up new ways of FORCING subscribers to watch commercials, like blocking the "skip/slip" key or this new innovation described in this thread.

When the day comes that DirecTV DVR's can't skip commercials, they will find a mass exodus of subscribers since that is the PRIMARY reason for paying the premium price for a DVR.

Congrats; if you are looking for new insignificant things to worry about, I think you might have found one.

Lets be clear that there is no "blocking" going on here; its just that what 30SKIP needs to work is not available when inserts are made, and so it gives up. It really has no other choice.

We also can stop pretending that this sort of control is just on the cusp of becoming possible. Any commercial DVD you bought since DVDs were first printed still prevents you from jumping ahead of the FCC warning. They control both the vertical and the horizontal; always have, always will.

What is significant is what their choices will be in how to use this long-existing technology. What motivates them? They are certainly not motivated to bite the hand (our hand) that feeds them.

DISH has made a very interesting choice, which goes somewhat to the other extreme. Their Hopper/Joey product records prime time in a revolutionary manner, but what it really revolutionary is that once those shows air, they go in and find the start and end of each commercial break and then send that info over the sat to the subscribers so that your Hopper can jump right over them perfectly, frame-accurately, as long as you wait a few hours, until the block recording is complete. Of course they have poked the bear with this behavior; 3 of the 4 major networks are suing their pants off over it, and will likely win.

 

[spartanstew]

I don't think I'm that unusual in saying skipping commercials is not the primary reason. Trickplay overall is the second reason behind time shifting.

Agreed, and I would think we're in the vast majority.

 

[TomCat]

You can think its on purpose all you want, but since I can have the same exact program recorded on two different dvrs, and have one show the bug on the same commercial that the other doesn't, I will know better.

I was sorry to hear about your recent head injury, Inky. Get well soon. Be sure to refill that prescription promptly. But what was clear to everyone else is that no one ever hinted that any of this might be on purpose, least of all me.

Also, quite often in testing, the insert commercial is the same as the original commercial, and some DVRs get the insert while others do not. That could easily mean that one DVR might have 30SKIP issues while another under the same roof doesn't, viewers would see no difference, and that the comparison is therefore not empirically sound. But of course that could lead one to think that they know better, if they are prone to jump to unsupported false conclusions.

 

[inkahauts]

I was sorry to hear about your recent head injury, Inky. Get well soon. Be sure to refill that prescription promptly. But what was clear to everyone else is that no one ever hinted that any of this might be on purpose, least of all me.

Also, quite often in testing, the insert commercial is the same as the original commercial, and some DVRs get the insert while others do not. That could easily mean that one DVR might have 30SKIP issues while another under the same roof doesn't, viewers would see no difference, and that the comparison is therefore not empirically sound. But of course that could lead one to think that they know better, if they are prone to jump to unsupported false conclusions.

Then why did you start off by saying, this is not a bug? No matter how you slice it, you are saying they made a specific choice to not make it work, even if it was by omission, then you are saying they are doing it on purpose.

And by the way, in my example, since it was a national channel and the ad was a local LA only ad that would have no need to be shown anywhere else in the country, your suggestion doesn't hold water. You are the only one jumping to unsupported facts, since you claim to know exactly how directv has programmed their units to operate, and that there is no way that you actually do know, since they would never allow you to give out that info. That's not saying that you don't have a lot of correct info, but you have no way of knowing or proving they are leaving off indicators on purpose, which you are claiming, or that they don't have some mechanism to overcome what you claim may be causing the issue, and that that mechanism is breaking down sometimes.

And really, no need to try and be insulting, it lowers the quality of posts on the board.

 

[RunnerFL]

And really, no need to try and be insulting, it lowers the quality of posts on the board.

Pot, meet kettle...

 

[CCarncross]

Pot, meet kettle...

Are you really comparing the quality of inkahauts posts to someone thats been on my ignore list for a very long time due to the lack of quality of his posts? :lol:

 

[RunnerFL]

Are you really comparing the quality of inkahauts posts to someone thats been on my ignore list for a very long time due to the lack of quality of his posts? :lol:

Nope, just saying people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. Don't complain about someone insulting you when you insult others. Pretty simple actually. I learned it in Kindergarten.

 

[Scott Kocourek]

Guys take it to PM, stay on topic or have your posts deleted.