Commercial Skipping 2014

[adam1991]

I used to use ShowAnalyzer but it seems like development has stopped.

I fail to understand why this makes people say "so I can't/won't use it". It's still a product; it still does everything it did, say, 3 years ago.

So what if the development has stopped? That doesn't mean the product just stop working or doing everything it ever did. Do you immediately get rid of a car because the manufacturer switched to a new model?

[errrrrrrrrrik]

Does showanalyzer require that shows be recoded, or does it simply mark up the original recording to enable navigation around marked commercials?

How long does it take for showanalyzer to analyze a 60 minute recording?

[barnabas1969]

Does showanalyzer require that shows be recoded, or does it simply mark up the original recording to enable navigation around marked commercials?

How long does it take for showanalyzer to analyze a 60 minute recording?

Both ShowAnalyzer and Comskip scan the recorded TV show for commercials. Neither modifies the original video file. Both create an XML file which is used by the DTB add-in to automatically skip commercials while you are watching the recording.

How long it takes depends on how fast your CPU is, how much RAM you have available, how fast the RAM is, and how fast your hard drive is.

My system (see details here) processes a 1-hour show in about 15 minutes.

[RyC]

Interesting. I would have thought that your i5 would be able to process shows quicker. When I started, I was running a 2 ghz Core 2 Duo and it would take ~15 minutes for an hour show with Comskip. Then a 3 ghz Core 2 Duo reduced it to maybe 8 minutes, and now I have an (admittedly way overpowered for HTPC) 3.4 ghz Xeon and an hour show takes ~2 minutes.

The Passmark score of your i5 is 6000, and my old 3 ghz Core 2 Duo is 2000...unless there's another bottleneck, I would think processing a show should be quicker than 15 minutes.

[barnabas1969]

OK, so that was a guess-timate. I just looked at the ShowAnalyzer User Interface, and the most recent show processed was 1 hour, 1 minute, and 55 seconds. It took 3 minutes, 58 seconds to process it.

[barnabas1969]

And... now that I'm looking... I see that I have LOTS of ShowAnalyzerEngine.exe processes running (31 of them), consuming a BUNCH of RAM... even though I have DTB set to only run 2 at a time.

My PC automatically reboots every day. It starts trying to reboot at 2:30AM, and waits until all recordings are finished and no extenders are connected. My process creates a log of when it reboots, and it rebooted at exactly 2:30AM today. So, that means that 31 SA processes started since 2:30AM this morning!

Sum-ting-wong.

I'll have to look closer. I never noticed this behavior on my old system, which ran an i5-760CPU on an ASUS P7P55D-E LX motherboard. Perhaps I need to setup rules so that it only attempts to scan non-copy-protected recordings. Others have mentioned this problem with ShowAnalyzer in the past, but I've never noticed it until now.

No matter... it's an easy fix.

[barnabas1969]

Hmmm... maybe not so easy! I added a condition for commercial skipping so that it wouldn't try to process copy-protected shows... but the list of SA processes keeps growing.

Interestingly enough, it keeps processing the same (non-copy-protected) shows over and over. Perhaps I was running an older version on my old HTPC. I'll have to check that.

[machausta]

(If you are using the free version of comskip you have to set up a custom DVRMSToolbox action to dump the recording to .dvr-ms and then process that, which will only work in post-processing. I never had much luck in getting that to work because any glitch in the .wtv file will cause the converter to crash.)

This gives me some hope, I tried getting both comskip and SA working late last year but neither one passed the WAF due to chopping off some of the intro for her favorite shows.

[adam1991]

This gives me some hope, I tried getting both comskip and SA working late last year but neither one passed the WAF due to chopping off some of the intro for her favorite shows.

Huh? The intro?

I've configured SA, via its configuration tool, to behave exactly like ReplayTV did: always consider the first and last 2 minutes of a program to be content, not commercials.

Works great. Give it a try.

[barnabas1969]

Read this link to learn how to configure ShowAnalyzer:

http://www.engadget.com/topics/hd/2010/ ... ection-ac/

EDIT: It's waaayyyy easier than configuring Comskip!

[werds]

SA was definitely easy to install and setup. Can't compare to Comskip as I did not try it. Unfortunately for WAF SA's ability to accurately predict the correct spots where commercials begin and end was wildly innacurate on the handful of shows that I tested it on (mostly shows my wife would be watching).

So turned it all off until Summer break allows me time to tweak things better - otherwise the wife, whom is change averse, would have me sleeping outdoors in a tent.

[ThePaladinTech]

So I've read most of this. At the moment I am using DVRMStoolbox, Comskip, and DTBAddin. Am I correct that I could be using DirMon2 instead of DVRMStoolbox?
So it would be DirMon2, Comskip and DTBAddin?? Any Benefit / issue going with DirMon2?

also I had paid for Early Access to ShowAnalyzer when it was being actively developed. Is the currently available (to anyone) ShowAnalyzer the most current? or if I can find my Early Access Show Analyzer is it better???

[mogulman]

DVRMSToolbox, DTBaddin and comskip 81.088

If you don't like DVRMToolbox filewatcher, then Dirmon2. Either one works fine.