MCEBuddy & WMC Pre-Post-Padding

[TheOsburnFamil]

Hey Gang-- For those of you using MCEBuddy on your TV Recordings... I'm curious how you're fairing with comskip detection on your recorded tv if it's pre/post padded? I seem to be getting a lot of videos with a good 30-40 seconds before & after that comskip is missing. Any suggestions?

Thanks!

[Space]

I don't use MCEBuddy, but I assume it is using the comskip program?

I am not sure if you are complaining about it marking stuff as commercials that you don't want as commercials or vice versa. For me I don't want it to mark anything at the beginning or end as commercials.

I put the following in comskip.ini to make sure it does not mark anything at the start or end of the recording as a commercial (90 seconds at the beginning and 40 seconds at the end):

always_keep_first_seconds=90 ;Any commercial at the start shorter then this amount of seconds will be regarded as show
always_keep_last_seconds=40 ;Any commercial at the end shorter then this amount of seconds will be regarded as show

[STC]

So you record without padding Space?

[TheOsburnFamil]

Yes, it's MCEBuddy using ComSkip. After all these years, I finally decided to try comskipping my tv recordings.
My WMC recording defaults are set to pre-pad 2 minutes and post-pad 3 minutes & I'm doing HD recordings via Ceton cablecard tuners.

I decided to "donate" for the latest MCEBuddy to see how well it would handle some of my recordings I'd like to keep, but w/o commercials. I installed with the defaults and tried doing this entire season of The Big Bang Theory. I don't know if it's the CBS logo causing it or something else, but every episode has commercials or whatever was in that pre & post padding, plus it seems to miss a commercial here or there.

I don't blame MCEBuddy as it's doing everything I'd expect it to do. This seems like a comskip thing & I'm not sure if there's some tweaking I can do to make it better. My gut is telling me it's the CBS logo so I'm trying all last season's Tyrant now to see if it has any better success.

What do folks usually set comskip's detection to? Do people use the logo detection or do they keep that one unchecked?

[Space]

So you record without padding Space?

I usually have 15 seconds pre-padding and 1 minute post-padding, but for only for purposes of skipping commercials (I don't archive anything or cut out the commercials, so this is just for skipping the commercials of time-shifted shows during playback).

I have found that the skipping of commercials at the start of the recording is erratic and sometimes it skips part of the show, so I just force it to not skip anything within the first 1 1/2 minutes. Also, I don't want it to skip to the end of the recording either, as I may miss the end of the show or previews and there is no easy way to jump back to see the last few seconds of the recording. By having comskip always stop at least 40 seconds before the end of the video, I can easily check if there is any previews or even the start of the next show (if the network starts the show early) without having to deal with restarting the video and jumping to "almost the end" to see it.

...

What do folks usually set comskip's detection to? Do people use the logo detection or do they keep that one unchecked?

I keep logo detection enabled. I think it is one of the most reliable ways of detecting commercials.

There are defiantly lots of tweaks that you can make in the comskip.ini file, and I've made a few, but that was a while back and I never really got it working the way I would like.

I would not feel comfortable giving too much advise on this, since I really don't know that much about it, but one thing I do remember changing was the brightness level. I was having a problem where comskip was detecting commercials where there were none in dark scenes of the TV show "Grimm", so I did a little testing and found that I could eliminate that problem by lowering the darkness threshold (the amount of darkness in the frame before comskip considers it a black frame).

Here are my current settings:

max_avg_brightness=16 ;maximum average brightness for a dim frame to be considered black (scale 0 to 255) 0 means autosetting
test_brightness=16 ;frame not pure black if any pixels checked are greater than this, will check average brightness (scale 0 to 255)
max_brightness=16 ;frame not black if any pixels checked are greater than this (scale 0 to 255)

Also, another thing I remember changing is associated with the logo detection mentioned above. I saw that sometimes the logo would still be on the screen at the start of the commercial, which sometimes caused the start of the commercial detection to be delayed, so I made this change:

shrink_logo=2

Which made comskip pretend that the logo disappeared 2 seconds sooner than it actually did. This fixed that problem.

It is probably best to view/post your issues on the comskip support forum, as they are the most knowledagle about comskip over there.

[adam1991]

I decided to "donate" for the latest MCEBuddy to see how well it would handle some of my recordings I'd like to keep, but w/o commercials. I installed with the defaults and tried doing this entire season of The Big Bang Theory. I don't know if it's the CBS logo causing it or something else, but every episode has commercials or whatever was in that pre & post padding, plus it seems to miss a commercial here or there.

I don't blame MCEBuddy as it's doing everything I'd expect it to do. This seems like a comskip thing & I'm not sure if there's some tweaking I can do to make it better. My gut is telling me it's the CBS logo so I'm trying all last season's Tyrant now to see if it has any better success.

What do folks usually set comskip's detection to? Do people use the logo detection or do they keep that one unchecked?

I don't use comskip, but we've discussed the CBS thing here (I think) before. It absolutely is a problem network for this kind of thing. A few years ago I tweaked ShowAnalyzer better to handle CBS, based on some suggestions someone made here--and it worked. I have CBS down to 95% or more accuracy, believe it or not.

That's the advantage of ShowAnalyzer over comskip--SA can have specific rules for specific situations, like "on CBS always behave this way". With comskip, last I saw, it's all or nothing--or has that changed?

[STC]

When yo use DTB as the controller you can adjust for specific channels and shows with an ini file for each one

[Space]

DVRMSToolbox can be configured to call comskip with different .ini files based on any metdata in the .WTV file, but I've never done it.

http://www.thegreenbutton.tv/forums/vie ... f=9&t=2462

It appears that you need to create a different profile for each .ini file you want to call, which is a bit cumbersome, but I guess it works.

[adam1991]

yeah, I'm remembering this now. comskip can be wrestled around to doing this to some degree, but it's an unnatural act. ShowAnalyzer was built from the ground up with such capabilities, to set up different rules based on any metadata in the wtv file.

[STC]

It's actually very easy to setup and use as I have done in testing on a few suspect channels and shows. The base ini is the default used with some tweaks. ShowAnalyzer stopped working for me when I moved to a cableCARD tuner many years ago.

[adam1991]

I may have to look at it again. I remember to have it mimic the ShowAnalyzer functionality, at the time, was difficult at best--but I do remember people able to tweak the base .ini for some specific purposes without harming the overall functionality for everything.

I started with cableCARD and ShowAnalyzer, and it worked fine--because none of my recordings had DRM attached. When I cut pay TV and went to OTA, SA never skipped a beat.

(Nor did WMC--all my recording schedule stayed intact, and WMC just kept on going after I redid tuner setup.)