this post was submitted on 05 May 2024
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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?

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[–] refalo 14 points 6 months ago (12 children)

take the hdmi stream from my Apple TV

I think there's two big obstacles here: HDCP and processing power. Most legal devices you can buy will not support simply handing over HDCP-unecrypted raw frames for you to mess with as that defeats the whole point of HDCP.

But even if you get past that, you're going to need at least a very high speed FPGA or ASIC, optionally also connected to a reasonably high-end PC, in order to be able to modify the stream in real-time and send it back out... certainly no current rpi can do this in even 1080p in real-time, and many devices now are going to 4k and beyond.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago

Yeah I think hdcp and reprocessing would be most difficult. There are hdmi splitter devices like those used for coloured bias lighting that I think could be used….similarly I think the processing actually isn’t unsolvable, it’s not much different than object detection from a live camera stream. I agree re-encoding the stream would be too hardware intensive for anything “cheap” like a pi, hence the secondary device control alternative initially, but analyzing the stream should be possible.

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