Problem with comclean

[B. C.]

Not sure if this is the right forum, but thought I'd ask here first. I'm trying to get comskip and comclean working to automatically take out commercials off of the recordings from gbpvr.

Comskip seems to work fine, but comclean (and I suppose by extension mgptx), have problems cutting out any commercials after the first one. What will typically happen is that the resulting cleaned mpg file from comclean will have the first commercial removed fine, but at the second commercial boundary, the mpg will just go black for several minutes and then the picture will come back at some point later on in the show.

I'm sure that comskip is generating the necessary information because I've had it generate output for VideoRedo and Cuttermaran and used the output files to successfully delete all commercials with both products. And I've compared the cut points for those to the .txt file and they look fine.

I'd really like to utilize comclean because of the lower overhead and ease of driving it. I'm using the latest version from http://mk.kaashoek.com/gbpvr.

Thanks for any assistance or pointers.

[reboot]

It sounds like you're playing back the original mpg, not the cleaned one, and gbpvr is skipping the first commercial block, but not any of the others.
Try manually playing back the cleaned file in WMP or some other player.
If videoredo and cuttermaran are working correctly when you use them manually, try using Comclean2 with cuttermaran instead.
There's also a method to use comskip with Videoredo to do things automatically, if you can't get comclean working.
http://forums.nextpvr.com/showthread.php...=videoredo

[B. C.]

Thanks. I should have mentioned that this is playing back the cleaned one (not the original one) via WMP, not through gbpvr. I've tried out comclean2 and also the VideoRedo solution. Both work ok, but the amount of time and overhead in having the GUI come up and process seems exponential compared to how long comclean and mpgtx run. I also tried an alternate version of mgptx from sourceforge with worse results.

[reboot]

It seems you may be suffering from the corrupted timecode problem associated with mpgtx.
The process I outlined in the link above doesn't have any GUI during processing, and seems faster than comclean2/cuttermaran.
Have you tried playing these back through gbpvr, or any other software? WMP really sucks IMHO.
What decoder are you using?

[B. C.]

I've gotten the commercial removal working using comskip and mencoder (as outlined elsewhere in the forums) instead of comclean, so I'm going to go that route for now. Thanks for the suggestions.