Detecting scene transitions in a video
Scenes generally exhibit a fade-to-black transition. You could capture those frames with simple image processing tools, which are found in many libraries, such as OpenCV.

If you want to rely on the change of the mis-an-scene to be robust against sudden changes, then of cours algorithms for detecting temporal differences is more appropriate. For that, you might want to consider:

http://vis.uky.edu/~cheung/courses/ee639_fall04/readings/spie99.pdf
http://www.mitsubishi-electric-itce.fr/uk-rce/pubdocs/VIL07-D071.pdf

If you want a simple algorithm do as described here:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4801053/video-scene-detection-implementation

For harder cases, you might even try GMM-like background models to test if the transition was a temporarily quick shot or a complete change.