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?

Yes those are FPGA/ASIC based solutions like I mentioned. That should work for 1080p at least, but getting to 4k is still prohibitively expensive.

impossible

My understanding is the DMCA explicitly allows reverse engineering of encryption for interoperability purposes… the only problem is that would have to specifically be tested in court to know if the government would agree in this instance, and nobody wants to try it.

umami_wasabi
link
fedilink
06M

Overlay isn’t transcoding. All it need is a muxer like MKVToolNix. I doubt it need much processing power.

Muxing has nothing to do with HDMI

umami_wasabi
link
fedilink
06M

It doesn’t and I didn’t ever mentioned HDMI in my reply. Just doubt if overlaying another encrypted stream with a muxer ever need that much processing power to the point of “prohibitively expensive”.

Encrypted streams also don’t have anything to do with a muxer, I really don’t understand what you’re trying to say. Muxers are for handling file formats, which is not being discussed at all, this is about raw video frame processing in hardware.

umami_wasabi
link
fedilink
0
edit-2
6M

Well, I’m simply reciting what is described on the page based on my understanding. From the diagram, it does not do raw frame processing from the source (assuming HDMI w/ HDCP) as the stream remains encrypted. By the look of it, it is copy or passthrough to the muxer (as it labeled). With some magic, it muxes two encrypted streams into one and output to the video sink. How is that done I have no idea.

That diagram is describing the hardware side of the NeTV, which is an FPGA device doing all this. That “mux” is describing a hardware 2:1 mux on the raw video streams, such as https://vlsiverify.com/verilog/verilog-codes/multiplexer/

The “magic” is described here: https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/2011/implementation-of-mitm-attack-on-hdcp-secured-links/

umami_wasabi
link
fedilink
2
edit-2
6M

Got it. I can see where the problem is niw and how can the hardware is limiting. Thanks for the great article.

Create a post

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

Chat rooms

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

  • 0 users online
  • 57 users / day
  • 383 users / week
  • 1.5K users / month
  • 5.7K users / 6 months
  • 1 subscriber
  • 2.96K Posts
  • 74.6K Comments
  • Modlog