6 ms·

The Arduino Solution to Selectively Mute Over-Exposed Celebrities

190 points by etruong42 15y ago

danilocampos 15y ago
I know it's in bad sport to point out a straightforward solution that obviates a clever one, but... I find it's more effective simply to not watch TV. Ditch your cable, stop imbibing mind poison, and torrent/purchase/stream specific, worthwhile content according to your ethical predispositions. Our population grows ever dumber, ever more apathetic. Mainstream content is optimized around this. Better to opt out of most of it. That said: boy, nothing beats Arduino for rekindling my boyhood sense of magic and imagination. Well, perhaps with the exception of seeing the world through the eyes of David Attenborough.
- billybob 15y ago
  Ditto. I am happy to say that I'm only vaguely aware of any of the celebs/scandals mentioned, because I don't watch TV. I can't avoid seeing celeb mags in the grocery store checkout line, but I recognize fewer and fewer of the names. Also: although I've seen posters of Bieber, I've never heard him sing. See how nice life can be without TV? Now, if only Adblock Freedom were real: http://chromeadblock.com/freedom/ http://chromeadblock.com/freedom/
  - mirkules 15y ago
    In television, like in life, you have to look for the gems that make up quality programming. I recently ran across a show where Stephen Hawking talked about the existence of God and black holes. Awesome program. After the show finished, it was immediately followed by "Axe Men" (or something). Does that mean Discovery channel sucks? Nope. You win some, you lose some. Likewise, I accidentally flipped to a channel with Spanish Flamenco dancing on a public channel, which was so far outside of my normal routine and culturally enriching that I couldn't help but watch. Where people get in trouble is when they use TV as a crutch to live life vicariously instead of using it to enrich their view of the world (or universe). Eleanor Roosevelt once said "Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, and simple minds discuss people." It's amazing how much more you can get out of television (or life) when you categorize a show into one of those three boxes and select the first one.
    - billybob 15y ago
      Maybe so, but I'm not willing to sift through whatever happens to be playing at any given time, hoping to find something good and likely wasting my time. If all of TV's content were on something like Youtube, I might watch. "Whatever I want, whenever I want" should be the default mode of entertainment in the internet age.
      - mirkules 15y ago
        True, but that's the point of TiVo and DVR
- steve-howard 15y ago
  While I concur that not watching TV is a decent solution, please don't insult the population. Is mainstream content dumbed down? Certainly. Should people find a way to entertain themselves without passive consumption? Absolutely. But let's not get on a high horse.
  - vidar 15y ago
    I think he is rather downplaying the problem, horse or no horse.
  - danilocampos 15y ago
    You don't see the entropy I've described? What, exactly, is "insulting" about the observation? I didn't grow up around much money. We weren't poor, because my mom worked her ass off. But most people around me were. They reproduce endlessly, these poor, because poverty, religion and ignorance of birth control are all best friends. Each successive generation ends up just a little more screwed than the last, as pregnancies roll into the mid-teen years, and generations start stacking. Women in their 30's, grandmothers. Financial literacy isn't taught in schools – schools, which, thanks to all this reproduction, are packed to the gills with students who don't focus all that well because they have miserable home lives. They don't learn how to learn. They grow up, work way more jobs than any human being should have to bear at once, entirely robbed of the time needed to broaden their mind and their skills. And this is if they're lucky, and didn't get sucked into gang violence or drug abuse. In aggregate? The population gets dumber because what other outcome can there be from this reality? This is nothing to do with being on a high horse. This is observing that most TV is shit because so much of the population that exists to consume it hasn't had the opportunities to desire anything better.
    - wdewind 15y ago
      Citation needed.
      - danilocampos 15y ago
        c.f. My entire childhood.
- jack7890 15y ago
  I think you're missing the point here. He isn't actually suggesting this is the best possible solution to the problem. He's just showing off a cool hack and giving it a little backstory for fun.
- mixmastamyk 15y ago
  Yep, sold my TV in 2004 and don't miss it a bit. We've got free Dvd's from the library and Netflix streaming when we need a movie night. Best part--haven't seen a commercial or heard anything about B. Spears in YEARS. The garbage and corporate agenda eventually clears from the mind.
swah 15y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias#Biased_search_for_information http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias#Biased_search..., now in hardware!
mhd 15y ago
Never mind that this specific example isn't that practical (assuming you're not one of those people who has their TV on in the background all the time), it is a nice example of arduino-ing your TV… IIRC, close captioning isn't transmitted in this manner with systems other than NTSC (PAL -> Teletext?).
ChuckMcM 15y ago
I think this is a clever hack, and good clean fun. +1 In the way back times, at a place called Sun Labs, there was a very bright engineer whose name escapes me (he lurks here so perhaps he will fess up) who built a system which would record the full CNN feed and then 'decorate' that feed with the text from the closed caption decoder. He would store both the text and the SMPTE time codes for the video into a simple round robin database (RRD). You could then sit down and say "What news stories mentioned X over the last 24 hrs?" and it could cue up video snippets around the places where the CC data had that key word in it. As a bonus (because back then a big disk was 500MB) if the closed captioning was identical it could 'de-dupe' the video (basically it wouldn't store story repeats. I thought it was quite clever at the time. I'm surprised its not part of the DirecTV product or TiVO today. On a related note, this engineer discovered that generally advertisements were not closed captioned, so he could have the mute follow the close captioning stream and the commercials would automatically be muted. Nice eh? Actually one could probably do that with the Arduino hack too...
- Jun8 15y ago
  Nowadays advertisements are generally CC'ed. However, since most commercials have music, they have the music symbol in the CC stream, you may want to hunt for cues like that.
  - Turing_Machine 15y ago
    Since the caption text is always the same, you could set it up so you could push a button when a commercial came on and push it again when the commercial was over. Then it could scan backward to the previous black transition before each button press to find the actual beginning and end of the commercial, and store the caption text in between. The next time it sees that caption text, automute. :-) At least this way you'd only have to see a specific commercial once. You'd probably need to do some tuning of the number of keywords it sees before going to mute -- it'd be a tradeoff between false alarms and having to listen to more of the commercials.
    - Wilya 15y ago
yarone 15y ago
I'd like to detect commercials and reduce volume to 50%. Possible?
- Jun8 15y ago
  Detection of TV commercials using video analysis is now considered an almost solved problem, which systems having a high rate accuracy. However, you won't be able to such a thing using an Arduino (the BeagleBoard may be an option). If you want a simpler solution, a better way to detect commercials than trying to analyze CC info, I think, would be to check the average loudness. See this article: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17229281/ns/business-consumer_news/t/why-are-tv-commercials-louder-show/ http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17229281/ns/business-consumer_ne..., basically what it says is that commercials seem louder but are actually not (because they are not allowed to). The peak level is the same as normal programs but the average audio level is way higher. This should be easy top detect.
  - pbhjpbhj 15y ago
    >commercials seem louder but are actually not (because they are not allowed to) // The UK Advertising Standards Authority recently took action saying they had proven that TV ads were being amplified above general volume levels - http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1251583/ITV-finally-censured-turning-volume-ads-annoyance-millions.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1251583/ITV-fin... (not the best source but good enough here). US Congress voted in the CALM Act, http://usgovinfo.about.com/b/2010/12/20/obama-signs-tv-commercial-volume-law.htm http://usgovinfo.about.com/b/2010/12/20/obama-signs-tv-comme... to curb excessively loud TV ads.
- nitrogen 15y ago
  You could modify MythTV's commercial detection to reduce the audio instead of skipping commercials entirely. Unfortunately commercial detection in MythTV is a non-realtime post-processing step.
xbryanx 15y ago
I wonder how well this works. The closed captions I look at on TV from time to time are so regularly garbled and misspelled that it might miss most of the proper nouns I am filtering for.
- shabble 15y ago
  Add some sort of edit-distance metric? Might need a bit of tuning for your specific interference and the nature of the words you're matching for, I suspect.
nickpinkston 15y ago
I prefer to just use my http://tvbgone.com http://tvbgone.com that I put in a hollowed out old cellphone. Great for those sports bar moments when I just want to stop hearing...
- carbonica 15y ago
  Sports bars certainly aren't my favorite bars, but this just seems rude. It's supposed to be a loud place.
  - nickpinkston 15y ago
    I actually haven't used it - it's just for fun. Full disclosure - I live in Pittsburgh where sports are annoying everywhere: bar, doctor's office, etc. That's what I hate - having everything be covered with TV glow - especially sports fetishism...
- corin_ 15y ago
  Just to add to what carbonica said: nobody is forcing you to go to sports bars, if you don't want to be there then go find a quiet bar, don't come in and turn off what we're watching.
  - nickpinkston 15y ago
    As said above - there are like 2 quite bars - they do mak for good filters though.
Caligula 15y ago
There was an open source app that used sphinx to filter for the word twitter and mute it called twitterkiller. Shame it disappeared but it was listed at: http://cmusphinx.sourceforge.net/wiki/sphinxinaction http://cmusphinx.sourceforge.net/wiki/sphinxinaction
fuzionmonkey 15y ago
"Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people." - Eleanor Roosevelt
sixothree 15y ago
I wonder if it could be used to mute commercials too.
katherinehague 15y ago
This is awesome. You could probably take the same type of concept to create some sort of recommendation app that brings up current news results, or links to items for sale, based on the closed captions.
losethos 15y ago
maybe he's homo. They have the biggest problem with denial of God. God says... C:\TEXT\QUIX.TXT they pinched him so fast and so hard that he was driven to defend himself with his fists, and all this in marvellous silence. The battle lasted nearly half an hour, and then the phantoms fled; Dona Rodriguez gathered up her skirts, and bemoaning her fate went out without saying a word to Don Quixote, and he, sorely pinched, puzzled, and dejected, remained alone, and there we will leave him, wondering who could have been the perverse enchanter who had reduced him to such a state; but that shall be t
yason 15y ago
Uh, I don't get this. Why is he watching television (or having it turned on) if there's nothing interesting on? How about turning off the television? :-o

190 points by etruong42 15y ago

I know it's in bad sport to point out a straightforward solution that obviates a clever one, but... I find it's more effective simply to not watch TV. Ditch your cable, stop imbibing mind poison, and torrent/purchase/stream specific, worthwhile content according to your ethical predispositions. Our population grows ever dumber, ever more apathetic. Mainstream content is optimized around this. Better to opt out of most of it. That said: boy, nothing beats Arduino for rekindling my boyhood sense of magic and imagination. Well, perhaps with the exception of seeing the world through the eyes of David Attenborough.

billybob 15y ago
Ditto. I am happy to say that I'm only vaguely aware of any of the celebs/scandals mentioned, because I don't watch TV. I can't avoid seeing celeb mags in the grocery store checkout line, but I recognize fewer and fewer of the names. Also: although I've seen posters of Bieber, I've never heard him sing. See how nice life can be without TV? Now, if only Adblock Freedom were real: http://chromeadblock.com/freedom/ http://chromeadblock.com/freedom/
- mirkules 15y ago
  In television, like in life, you have to look for the gems that make up quality programming. I recently ran across a show where Stephen Hawking talked about the existence of God and black holes. Awesome program. After the show finished, it was immediately followed by "Axe Men" (or something). Does that mean Discovery channel sucks? Nope. You win some, you lose some. Likewise, I accidentally flipped to a channel with Spanish Flamenco dancing on a public channel, which was so far outside of my normal routine and culturally enriching that I couldn't help but watch. Where people get in trouble is when they use TV as a crutch to live life vicariously instead of using it to enrich their view of the world (or universe). Eleanor Roosevelt once said "Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, and simple minds discuss people." It's amazing how much more you can get out of television (or life) when you categorize a show into one of those three boxes and select the first one.
  - billybob 15y ago
    Maybe so, but I'm not willing to sift through whatever happens to be playing at any given time, hoping to find something good and likely wasting my time. If all of TV's content were on something like Youtube, I might watch. "Whatever I want, whenever I want" should be the default mode of entertainment in the internet age.
    - mirkules 15y ago
      True, but that's the point of TiVo and DVR
steve-howard 15y ago
While I concur that not watching TV is a decent solution, please don't insult the population. Is mainstream content dumbed down? Certainly. Should people find a way to entertain themselves without passive consumption? Absolutely. But let's not get on a high horse.
- vidar 15y ago
  I think he is rather downplaying the problem, horse or no horse.
- danilocampos 15y ago
  You don't see the entropy I've described? What, exactly, is "insulting" about the observation? I didn't grow up around much money. We weren't poor, because my mom worked her ass off. But most people around me were. They reproduce endlessly, these poor, because poverty, religion and ignorance of birth control are all best friends. Each successive generation ends up just a little more screwed than the last, as pregnancies roll into the mid-teen years, and generations start stacking. Women in their 30's, grandmothers. Financial literacy isn't taught in schools – schools, which, thanks to all this reproduction, are packed to the gills with students who don't focus all that well because they have miserable home lives. They don't learn how to learn. They grow up, work way more jobs than any human being should have to bear at once, entirely robbed of the time needed to broaden their mind and their skills. And this is if they're lucky, and didn't get sucked into gang violence or drug abuse. In aggregate? The population gets dumber because what other outcome can there be from this reality? This is nothing to do with being on a high horse. This is observing that most TV is shit because so much of the population that exists to consume it hasn't had the opportunities to desire anything better.
  - wdewind 15y ago
    Citation needed.
    - danilocampos 15y ago
      c.f. My entire childhood.
jack7890 15y ago
I think you're missing the point here. He isn't actually suggesting this is the best possible solution to the problem. He's just showing off a cool hack and giving it a little backstory for fun.
mixmastamyk 15y ago
Yep, sold my TV in 2004 and don't miss it a bit. We've got free Dvd's from the library and Netflix streaming when we need a movie night. Best part--haven't seen a commercial or heard anything about B. Spears in YEARS. The garbage and corporate agenda eventually clears from the mind.

swah 15y ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias#Biased_search_for_information http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias#Biased_search..., now in hardware!

mhd 15y ago

Never mind that this specific example isn't that practical (assuming you're not one of those people who has their TV on in the background all the time), it is a nice example of arduino-ing your TV… IIRC, close captioning isn't transmitted in this manner with systems other than NTSC (PAL -> Teletext?).

ChuckMcM 15y ago

I think this is a clever hack, and good clean fun. +1 In the way back times, at a place called Sun Labs, there was a very bright engineer whose name escapes me (he lurks here so perhaps he will fess up) who built a system which would record the full CNN feed and then 'decorate' that feed with the text from the closed caption decoder. He would store both the text and the SMPTE time codes for the video into a simple round robin database (RRD). You could then sit down and say "What news stories mentioned X over the last 24 hrs?" and it could cue up video snippets around the places where the CC data had that key word in it. As a bonus (because back then a big disk was 500MB) if the closed captioning was identical it could 'de-dupe' the video (basically it wouldn't store story repeats. I thought it was quite clever at the time. I'm surprised its not part of the DirecTV product or TiVO today. On a related note, this engineer discovered that generally advertisements were not closed captioned, so he could have the mute follow the close captioning stream and the commercials would automatically be muted. Nice eh? Actually one could probably do that with the Arduino hack too...

Jun8 15y ago
Nowadays advertisements are generally CC'ed. However, since most commercials have music, they have the music symbol in the CC stream, you may want to hunt for cues like that.
- Turing_Machine 15y ago
  Since the caption text is always the same, you could set it up so you could push a button when a commercial came on and push it again when the commercial was over. Then it could scan backward to the previous black transition before each button press to find the actual beginning and end of the commercial, and store the caption text in between. The next time it sees that caption text, automute. :-) At least this way you'd only have to see a specific commercial once. You'd probably need to do some tuning of the number of keywords it sees before going to mute -- it'd be a tradeoff between false alarms and having to listen to more of the commercials.
  - Wilya 15y ago

yarone 15y ago

I'd like to detect commercials and reduce volume to 50%. Possible?

Jun8 15y ago
Detection of TV commercials using video analysis is now considered an almost solved problem, which systems having a high rate accuracy. However, you won't be able to such a thing using an Arduino (the BeagleBoard may be an option). If you want a simpler solution, a better way to detect commercials than trying to analyze CC info, I think, would be to check the average loudness. See this article: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17229281/ns/business-consumer_news/t/why-are-tv-commercials-louder-show/ http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17229281/ns/business-consumer_ne..., basically what it says is that commercials seem louder but are actually not (because they are not allowed to). The peak level is the same as normal programs but the average audio level is way higher. This should be easy top detect.
- pbhjpbhj 15y ago
  >commercials seem louder but are actually not (because they are not allowed to) // The UK Advertising Standards Authority recently took action saying they had proven that TV ads were being amplified above general volume levels - http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1251583/ITV-finally-censured-turning-volume-ads-annoyance-millions.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1251583/ITV-fin... (not the best source but good enough here). US Congress voted in the CALM Act, http://usgovinfo.about.com/b/2010/12/20/obama-signs-tv-commercial-volume-law.htm http://usgovinfo.about.com/b/2010/12/20/obama-signs-tv-comme... to curb excessively loud TV ads.
nitrogen 15y ago
You could modify MythTV's commercial detection to reduce the audio instead of skipping commercials entirely. Unfortunately commercial detection in MythTV is a non-realtime post-processing step.

xbryanx 15y ago

I wonder how well this works. The closed captions I look at on TV from time to time are so regularly garbled and misspelled that it might miss most of the proper nouns I am filtering for.

shabble 15y ago
Add some sort of edit-distance metric? Might need a bit of tuning for your specific interference and the nature of the words you're matching for, I suspect.

nickpinkston 15y ago

I prefer to just use my http://tvbgone.com http://tvbgone.com that I put in a hollowed out old cellphone. Great for those sports bar moments when I just want to stop hearing...

carbonica 15y ago
Sports bars certainly aren't my favorite bars, but this just seems rude. It's supposed to be a loud place.
- nickpinkston 15y ago
  I actually haven't used it - it's just for fun. Full disclosure - I live in Pittsburgh where sports are annoying everywhere: bar, doctor's office, etc. That's what I hate - having everything be covered with TV glow - especially sports fetishism...
corin_ 15y ago
Just to add to what carbonica said: nobody is forcing you to go to sports bars, if you don't want to be there then go find a quiet bar, don't come in and turn off what we're watching.
- nickpinkston 15y ago
  As said above - there are like 2 quite bars - they do mak for good filters though.

Caligula 15y ago

There was an open source app that used sphinx to filter for the word twitter and mute it called twitterkiller. Shame it disappeared but it was listed at: http://cmusphinx.sourceforge.net/wiki/sphinxinaction http://cmusphinx.sourceforge.net/wiki/sphinxinaction

fuzionmonkey 15y ago

"Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people." - Eleanor Roosevelt

sixothree 15y ago

I wonder if it could be used to mute commercials too.

katherinehague 15y ago

This is awesome. You could probably take the same type of concept to create some sort of recommendation app that brings up current news results, or links to items for sale, based on the closed captions.

losethos 15y ago

maybe he's homo. They have the biggest problem with denial of God. God says... C:\TEXT\QUIX.TXT they pinched him so fast and so hard that he was driven to defend himself with his fists, and all this in marvellous silence. The battle lasted nearly half an hour, and then the phantoms fled; Dona Rodriguez gathered up her skirts, and bemoaning her fate went out without saying a word to Don Quixote, and he, sorely pinched, puzzled, and dejected, remained alone, and there we will leave him, wondering who could have been the perverse enchanter who had reduced him to such a state; but that shall be t

yason 15y ago

Uh, I don't get this. Why is he watching television (or having it turned on) if there's nothing interesting on? How about turning off the television? :-o