Tvheadend

Even Larsen wrote:

TVHeadend has/had a feature to skip commercials by detecting when the resolution was changed, this is not so common any more by broadcasters. What's however common is to boost the sound volume when showing commercials, if tvheadend could detect when the sound volume is boosted, this could be used as marker for start/stop of commercials.

I'm not sure how this would work, what happens if the programme suddenly gets louder? An action scene (here in the UK I've seen some films where they've boosted the audio in random spots) or a glitch in the transmission for example.

It could be hard to detect though but this would be useful and so would volume normalisation.

From what I know the broadcasters do normalize the volume before they have send out the show, so it should be possible to find a mean that suddenly jumps when the commercials starts. But yes, it may be a bit tricky to detect when a loud action scene suddenly cuts into a commercial break.

I am not strong at the mathematics used for sound processing so I was hoping somebody else with the know how could tell me if this is a doable solution or not.

Seems like you would want to record the whole program and use a front end to mute/skip/etc. This could allow you to continue watching if there was an accidental skip.

One algorithm to consider is if volume increases for > say 2 minutes and then normalizes again, then skip/delete.