Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uwm.edu!bionet!ig!ames!pasteur!cory.Berkeley.EDU!jlemon
From: jlemon@cory.Berkeley.EDU (Jonathan Lemon)
Newsgroups: sci.electronics
Subject: Re: Commercial killer idea
Message-ID: <18898@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU>
Date: 28 Oct 89 22:45:05 GMT
References: <1989Oct27.234823.483@mentor.com>
Sender: news@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU
Reply-To: jlemon@cory.Berkeley.EDU.UUCP (Jonathan Lemon)
Organization: University of California, Berkeley
Lines: 15

In article <1989Oct27.234823.483@mentor.com> mbutts@mentor.com (Mike Butts) writes:
>Are closed-captioned TV programs captioned during commercials?  If not,
>detecting lack of captioning might be a means of detecting commercial
>breaks.  It is probably much easier to detect presence or absence of
>captioning than to decode and display it, so such a device might be
>simple.

Perhaps the device might be simple, but unfortunately quite a few commercials
are also captioned.  Even if this is not the case, the station that is
re-broadcasting the signal generally always has the captioning carrier signal
present all the time.  This is used to display other information on the other
sidebands (known as TEXT/C1/C2 on the decoder) which has such information as
an up-to-date tv guide, or news reports.
--
Jonathan   ...ucbvax!cory!jlemon    or    jlemon@cory.Berkeley.EDU