Privacy

37028 readers

372 users here now

A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
Don't promote proprietary software
Try to keep things on topic
If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
Be nice :)

Related communities

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

HDMI stream live processing? (self.privacy)

submitted 11 months ago by Decipher0771 to c/[email protected]

39 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

The easiest thing to do would be to check for a volume limit or range compression option on your TV, sound bar, or whatever.

[–] Decipher0771 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

True….I’m hoping to expand on it to full ad detection and blocking eventually tho.

[–] adespoton 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Decipher0771 1 points 11 months ago

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.