House Passes TV Commercial Volume Bill 408
eldavojohn writes "About a year ago, legislation was introduced to control the volume of TV commercials. It passed the Senate in September and has now been passed in the House as well. This problem has dated back to the 1960s, but after the president signs the bill, broadcasters will be subject to regulations of the Advanced Television Systems Committee on what is 'too loud.' Of the last 25 quarterly reports from the FCC, this has been the number one consumer complaint in 21 of them. Within a year, you should start to notice a difference, with commercials no longer forcing you to turn down the TV volume during breaks in your regular programming."
comskippers rule (Score:4, Informative)
lots of comskip programs out there. I'm using a video editor called 'video redo' that does seamless cuts at the mpg mode and only re-encodes the cut/join part. ideal for saving edited tv shows.
I have my mythtv capture system save the .mpg file, video redo edits it and it has its own comskip feature that locates and lets me tweak the 'red areas' where the commercials are. it has a 'plot mask' to black out most of the screen so you don't have to view the content while editing.
life is good again ;) I have not seen a commercial since I started using this. shows are now 20 minutes shorter, too.
this is nice for those who don't have pvr's of some sort, but the war has already forced most of us to TOTALLY eliminate ads.
just like firefox and adblock/noscript make browsing more pleasant again, same with comskippers.
one channel seems to put all its commercials in SD and the show, itself, is in HD. let me thank them so much for making it TRIVIAL to detect when commercials come on. danke again for being stupid, tv execs.
Movies too (Score:4, Informative)
Re:I thought this was the law already... (Score:4, Informative)
Dynamic range compression? What we have (had?) in the UK was a decibel limit, so in some cases* they just lifted everything under the limit to increase loudness. Lots of hassle for that. The law seems to legally enforce ATSC guidelines for loudness on programming [atsc.org] when broadcasting ads, which on my cursory reading means that there's a strict loudness level and dynamic range they have to work to.
*Notoriously, when Lost came over here they ran an extra ten minutes of ads per episode and made them ridiculously loud
Adam Smith supported copyrights and patents (Score:5, Informative)
Interesting. I thought Adam Smith specifically supported patents and copyrights. Could you show me where in his works he said he doesn't? Please, go look it up. See what he actually believed, read Wealth of Nations yourself. Despite the libertarian caricature of him, Adam Smith believed that government regulations were absolutely vital to the functioning of a free market, that government should grant copyrights and patents, enforce contract law, build roads and infrastructure, and basically do everything it is now doing in the economic sphere.
Adam Smith WAS NOT a libertarian. Do not try to rewrite history to make him one.
Looking at the actual documents... (Score:4, Informative)
One of the OP links summarizes the law thus:
"The new law will require them all to comply with standards approved by the Advanced Television Systems Committee. Those standards have, up to this point, been characterized as mere 'recommended practices'; once the President signs the CALM Act, those standards will be The Law."
That article then links to "ATSC Recommended Practice: Techniques for Establishing and Maintaining Audio Loudness for Digital Television", which is Document A/85:2009, 4 November 2009. Lots of observations and experiments, and not having the time to read through in detail yet, I'm not sure if it will fix the problem or if it will give ammunition to the FCC to rap knuckles when they get complaints.
Still, the good news is that the politicians aren't making their own standards up, but rather elevating a document done by people who understand the topic.