comskip is skipping comskipping

[jksmurf]

how do you know it isn't working? By that I mean the log seems to make it clear that your PostProcessing.bat is being called. Do you have any logging in your PostProcessing.bat to see what's actually going on? In the NextPVR sticky thread I gave an example PostProcessing.bat that does a good amount of logging to "processing.log" in the same directory with comskip. This helped me quite a bit in debugging my .bat file.

Yes I know it's being called, but I know it's not working (like the OP) because nothing happens i.e. no .edl, logo.txt or .txt files are produced like in my GBPVR setup. I will try your logging tip to see what happens, but given both directories in my example are discontinuous named folders, I thought it fair to ask if the issue with such files had been fixed up. If it has not, then it could be a culprit. If not, I need to investigate some more.

[UPDATE!]
This seems to work (thank you) but for some reason when two shows have the same end time it only did one.

Code:

C:\
cd C:\Users\Public\NPVR\Scripts\
comskip.exe %1 >processing.log

processing.log

Code:

The commandline used was:
comskip.exe D:\GBPVRVids\Pingu\Pingu_20100925_16001615.ts

Opening D:\GBPVRVids\Pingu\Pingu_20100925_16001615.ts
Using comskip.ini for initiation values.
Commercials were not found.

[Reddwarf]

Did you copy your comskip.ini file from gbpvr directory?

[jksmurf]

Did you copy your comskip.ini file from gbpvr directory?

yep!

[speising]

Code:

C:\
cd C:\Users\Public\NPVR\Scripts\
comskip.exe %1 >processing.log

i'd like to point out that that code (">" instead of ">>") will overwrite the processing.log on each call, so only the last will be visible.

[johnsonx42]

This seems to work (thank you) but for some reason when two shows have the same end time it only did one.

Code:

C:\
cd C:\Users\Public\NPVR\Scripts\
comskip.exe %1 >processing.log

processing.log

Code:

The commandline used was:
comskip.exe D:\GBPVRVids\Pingu\Pingu_20100925_16001615.ts

Opening D:\GBPVRVids\Pingu\Pingu_20100925_16001615.ts
Using comskip.ini for initiation values.
Commercials were not found.

Running the std-out of comskip directly to a log file will cause a file lock condition so that any additional calls will fail. i.e. the first call opens the processing.log for writing; if you try to run comskip again with the same call, the processing.log is already opened and locked.

As speising points out you could use >> instead, which *might* allow simultaneous writing, but if that works it will just result in a gibberish log file with the output of two comskips intermingled.

Threre's really no reason to do any of that though - comskip already logs it's output to %1.log.

See my example PostProcessing.bat in the sticky thread for better ways to do logging.

[HarryH3]

Just to help you find it, IIRC, johnsonx42's example file was reply number 52 in that thread.

[johnsonx42]

oh, sure, just take all the mystery and challenge out of life why don't you

[jksmurf]

Running the std-out of comskip directly to a log file will cause a file lock condition so that any additional calls will fail. i.e. the first call opens the processing.log for writing; if you try to run comskip again with the same call, the processing.log is already opened and locked.

As speising points out you could use >> instead, which *might* allow simultaneous writing, but if that works it will just result in a gibberish log file with the output of two comskips intermingled.

Threre's really no reason to do any of that though - comskip already logs it's output to %1.log.

See my example PostProcessing.bat in the sticky thread for better ways to do logging.

Not sure what std-out means please? :confused:
At the risk of sounding churlish and I'm sure your .bat is great, but if I ever need to modify it, it's just a wee bit too complicated for my needs. The >>processing.log was great, simple for dummies like me.

I only really needed the log to see if it was working at all, which it is. Not sure what happens when I have two shows ending simultaneously yet though, still testing. If comskip already logs it's output to %1.log, I presume I invoke that with verbose=0 in comskip.ini?

k.

[johnsonx42]

I'm sorry for the confusion, std-out is a bit of a programmer term. It's short for Standard Output. Most command-line utilities that output text to the screen really write their text to a place called std-out. Normally, unless you specify something else, std-out is the screen (and likewise, std-in is the keyboard). However, if you'd like the output of a program to go somewhere else, like to a file, you redirect std-out using the '>' symbol. This way the program itself doesn't know or care about writing to the screen, files, or printers, or anything else you might think of to redirect it's output to; the OS handles all of that.

The single-form '>' means "redirect std-out of the preceeding command to the following file, which will be created if it doesn't exist or overwritten if it does".
The double-form '>>' means "redirect std-out of the preceeding command to the following file, which will be created if it doesn't exist or appended to if it does".
A very useful companion to those two is the pipe "|" which means "redirect std-out of the preceding command to std-in of the next command".

The reason "comskip %1 > logfile" breaks if you try to run it twice is that the first time you run it you're telling the OS to "create the file 'logfile' and and redirect the std-out of 'comskip.exe' to that file, holding it open the entire time comskip is running". The second time you run it, the first comskip is still running and still holding the 'logfile' open for it's std-out; therefore the redirection fails and the command is not run. As I said it might work with '>>' instead of '>', I'm not sure exactly how it does the file lock in that case, but if it did the result would be gibberish as the two comskips would write to the same 'logfile' at the same time.

I don't mean to suggest that you should use my entire .bat file, great though it is , merely that it shows a better way to do logging from a .bat file that won't create the problem you're having. You could do something as simple as this:

Code:

C:\
cd C:\Users\Public\NPVR\Scripts\
echo %date%,%time% - invoking comskip on %1 >>processing.log
comskip %1
echo %date%,%time% - comskip finished with %1 >>processing.log

edit: to be very complete, in the explanation I gave for ">" and ">>", when I say "file" it could also be a device, like COM1:, LPT1: or other devices; it's not relevant to this discussion, but I wanted to save someone else from feeling the need to point it out.

edit 2: and also, somewhere along the way I got in the habit of calling it "std-out", when it is actually more correctly or commonly written "stdout".

[jksmurf]

Excellent. Thanks for the easier code!
... and in a more geeky way, for the explanation of stdout :-)

k.