Commercial Skip Discussion

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STC

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Commercial Skip Discussion

#1

Post by STC » Tue Jun 14, 2011 7:05 pm

This is a quicky, I will add to later;

One of the best features I think in my setup is commercial skipping. I have things working I would say 98% right, with the odd false positive.
I use bagvants DTB, with the MC plugin together with comskip and a little profile that runs inside of DTB to do the dirty work.

I shall post more details soon, but was wondering how many of you skip and what method(s) do you use?
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richard1980

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#2

Post by richard1980 » Tue Jun 14, 2011 7:13 pm

DRM locks me out from pursuing commercial skipping. Even before DRM became an issue, I didn't bother with commercial skipping. The skip forward/instant replay buttons were good enough for me.

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#3

Post by STC » Tue Jun 14, 2011 7:22 pm

Oo bummer. Thankfully all my channels excluding VOD are copy free. For now anyways...
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#4

Post by lithium630 » Wed Jun 15, 2011 12:09 am

I tried Showanalyzer a few times but I never got it working well enough to make the wife happy. I'm looking forward to the new version coming that is supposed to be much easier to customize. I equate it to My Channel Logos, not a huge deal but still pretty sweet to have.

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#5

Post by STC » Wed Jun 15, 2011 12:28 am

I have to agree. SA worked great when i had an STB and was recording analogue via a Hauppauge SVIDEO input. Since I changed to a Ceton, it failed most detects.
I tried to twiddle around for weeks, but gave up and converted to Comskip. Unfortunately Compskip does not scan .wtv files, so the DTB profile I have waits until the recording is finished, makes a convert copy of it to .dvrms. Once converted, Comskip scans it and creates the time slices. The .dvrms file is then deleted.
I do miss live detection, but it's a small price to pay for accurate results.
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#6

Post by WScottCross » Wed Jun 22, 2011 3:44 pm

I am still using SA with VERY GOOD results on everything except CBS. I'm using the filewatcher in DTB to kick off SA. The version of SA I am using is the 1.0 Beta (with profiles version 1.0.0.825). It used to hang quite often but isn't doing that any more. I have profiles set up to skip the few channels that are protected and it's been nearly flawless for several months now. I used to have to check on it daily and now I don't even think about it much these days.

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#7

Post by STC » Wed Jun 22, 2011 4:02 pm

That's interesting considering you have 2 Infini's. I wonder what differs from either of our systems or indeed the broadcast from either head end?
SA for me failed miserably as soon as I changed to the Infini. This was about 8 months ago mind.
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#8

Post by lovemyram4x4 » Wed Jun 22, 2011 5:35 pm

I'm also using SAV1 beta and works great on almost every channel, it does have issues w/ new shows on CBS and ESPN2HD(setting a profile for these channels could probably fix this). I'm streams are delivered by FiOS and it makes no difference if it's recorded by my Ceton, ATI DCT or HDHomerun on how weel SAV1 works, other than 1 series I record only HD w/ >100 series scheduled. I also had the problem w/ SAV1 hanging on my old install but it's been much better on my new install(though it was good several months on the old one then became almost worthless due to hanging on almost everything) I only had to pause/kill once due to hanging. I can currently handle scanning 3 streams(I do live scanning-scans while recording), my new record storage array in my server should be able to handle much more.

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#9

Post by Venom51 » Wed Jun 22, 2011 7:46 pm

I split the duties between a couple machines. I have the DTB Addin on all the MCE7 boxes. All my recordings are processed after they have been moved to my NAS storage by a seperate box running ShowAnalyzer. I have SA set up to place the XML files in a shared location that all the MCE7 boxes can access. That allows me to process once but have commercial skipping at each MCE7 machine.

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#10

Post by acraigl » Thu Jun 23, 2011 7:38 pm

DTB and SA for me -- very happy generally speaking.
I get around DRM issues (hangs the commercial analyzer) by writing a blank commercial XML first, then checking to see if the show it copy protected. If it is, I stop processing, if not, I run my profile, now scanning for commercials, which overwrites the empty one I created earlier. Not only does this solve the DRM problem with skipping, but it also prevents prompts and rescan attempts post-reboot.

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#11

Post by glugglug » Thu Jun 23, 2011 8:59 pm

stonethecrows wrote:That's interesting considering you have 2 Infini's. I wonder what differs from either of our systems or indeed the broadcast from either head end?
SA for me failed miserably as soon as I changed to the Infini. This was about 8 months ago mind.
When you are recording via analog, the codecs built into Win7 are used to compress the video to MPEG-2.
When you use a digital tuner such as the InfiniTV, the compression is done by your cable company. Which may have wierd things in the MPEG-2 stream that SA isn't liking. I tried it for awhile, but it was also hanging/getting in endless loops too often for me to keep using it.

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#12

Post by MoaHunter » Fri Jun 24, 2011 9:33 am

I'm trying to use a similar setup to stonethecrows but have a problem I can't seem to get through.
Using a custom profile in dvrmstoolbox to convert any new .wtv (H264) recordings to .ts using remuxsupp (from mcebuddy.com) if there's no commercials.xml file. Then, it's set to run comskip over the .ts, using a specific ini file depending on the source channel.
The .ts is created, and the logs show that comskip is called, but there's no output after that. Running the comskip command from the command prompt creates the commercials.xml file in the desired directory without any problem. Anyone else doing something similar and had the same problem?

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#13

Post by STC » Sat Jun 25, 2011 5:04 pm

A possible; When you installed DTB, did you allow all users permissions?
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#14

Post by MoaHunter » Mon Jun 27, 2011 9:35 pm

Thanks for the reply. Yes, I'm pretty sure I allowed all users permissions. I'll reinstall shortly and take another look to double check.
I've been doing a bit more investigating - it seems that comskip does run, but goes for hours without any result. When run manually comskip usually takes about 30-60 minutes for a 1 hour h264 show. I'm trying to run the process with a high priority to see if that makes a difference.

The only other thing I can think of is that I replaced the version of comskip that came with DTB with the donator version. Can't imagine why that'd be a problem though. Just in case, I decided to try and explicitly call comskip with a RunExternal (and later with a RunExternalNoStatus). The last two lines I get when using DVRMStoMpegGUI are:
  • Run C:\Program Files (x86)\comskip\comskip.exe "V:\Video_TS\The Graham Norton Show_TV3_2011_06_24_20_27_00.ts" --ini="K:\Users\HTPC\Documents\Comskip_setup\comskip_TV3.ini" "V:\Recorded TV\CommercialsXML" sliently
    Run C:\Program Files (x86)\comskip\comskip.exe "V:\Video_TS\The Graham Norton Show_TV3_2011_06_24_20_27_00.ts" --ini="K:\Users\HTPC\Documents\Comskip_setup\comskip_TV3.ini" "V:\Recorded TV\CommercialsXML"

In other news, the version of remuxsupp from mceBuddy beta 14 released over the weekend is about 10x as fast at converting .wtv to .ts for me...

I'm not sure if this is the right place to post this - perhaps I should head over to the DVRMSToolbox forums? I'll post any progress.

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#15

Post by STC » Mon Jun 27, 2011 11:36 pm

Have you got Comskip or automatic selected as the Prefered Analyzer in DTB settings? Mines set to Compskip.
The path of Compskip is located in DVRMSToolbox\Applications. Mine is also the newest Compskip, but I had to place the exe in that location manually.

I'm kinda running out of ideas. Perhaps it would be useful if you post your custom profile.
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#16

Post by MoaHunter » Tue Jun 28, 2011 9:22 am

Well that's embarrassing...

Turns out everything was fine, I'd just set the priority too low.

Comskip takes about an hour for a 1 hour HD show if run at high priority, but apparently over 12 hours if run at a low priority. When the computer shuts down, the comskip process is aborted. For some reason FileWatcher doesn't reprocess the file. I guess it's a setting somewhere.

So now I'm a happy camper as it's processing as intended. All that's left is the minor detail of fine tuning comskip...

Anyhow, in case it's of use for anyone else, I've attached my custom profile. FileWatcher is set to watch for .wtv; if one is found it looks for a commercialsXML file - if that doesn't exist it converts the .wtv to .ts (as comskip can't process .wtv). Then it runs the custom comskip.ini file, as determined by the channel from which the show was recorded.

I guess if I was seeking perfection I'd try and use the ComskipAdvanced action instead of RunExternal, but someone wise once told me that better is the enemy of good. And this to me is good.
Attachments
Profile.zip
Custom dtb profile for processing h264 .wtv files with comskip
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#17

Post by STC » Tue Jun 28, 2011 12:14 pm

Ah lol :D
It's the Woods for the Trees.
Happens to me quite a lot.

Glad you have it working.
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#18

Post by Ragin Cajun » Sun Jul 03, 2011 12:37 am

i've been using SAV1 for a few months now with OTA recordings. It works 95% of the time. My biggest issue has been trying to convert wtv to a commercial-free mp4 or mkv .... hell, any other video format really. Any suggestions?
Also, is it possible to have more than one profile running at once in DTb? I am using a great program ( http://wtvmetarenamer.codeplex.com/) that scans my wtv files, renames and sorts every few hours, but would like to scan those for commercials before they get sorted (liv tv viewing) and then convert the wtv to a comm-free mp4 after it gets renamed and sorted (archived)

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#19

Post by silverbullet07 » Tue Feb 10, 2015 3:06 pm

So what is the best software for commercials today? I see a lot of older posts. Is the MCEBuddy the way to go?

What I would like is a program to monitor the recorded tv folder location, mark and remove the commercials before we come to watch it. I don't have a need to move or convert at this time but may be handy in the future.

[Moderator note: topic merged]

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#20

Post by STC » Tue Feb 10, 2015 5:23 pm

DTB here. Still going strong. A bit of a job setting things up but once running, rock solid.
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