comskip success in the UK

[johnnyb]

Thanks for all the replies. Posted the problem then went away for xmas!! Not very clever.

Agree with what gEd and martint123 say. For freeview (dvb-t) channels with a logo, it seems to be on 100% of the time. Switching off logo detection for these channels seems to give better results, but not really useable.

Erik, I will re-read your guide again and try some tweaking, but it hasn't helped much in the past.

I was hoping that someone in the uk had managed to get good results and would post their comskip.ini files for the rest of us to use.

[erik]

That is why I suggested you asked my help anyway because I assume its not a simple problem for these channels. And I like a challenge

[frankmcg]

Just stumbled across this thread and thought I'd have a go at tuning comskip for ITV4 in the UK.

While comskip identifies all the commercial breaks just fine, it always seems to cut too early both at the start and end of the break ie the show jumps to the end of the break to early (so have to rewind) then cuts a good few seconds before the show starts again (so have to fast forward!).

Logos are shown during the show only although occasionally there are black screens which should make detection easy I would have thought? Have tried playing around with "padding" in the ini but doesn't seem to change anything.

Any ideas? Have posted a file I've generated in case that helps. For reference the first commercial break identified is about 20 seconds too early, so is cutting in the middle of the show which doesn't make much sense as there's nothing to trigger a cut ie no black screen, no logo disappearing? Is the timeline somehow getting corrupted?

[erik]

Please set
output_framearray=1
in you ini file and rerun comskip
Then make a copy of the generated .txt file and edit it such that it contains the correct frame numbers.
Look in the comskip documentation on how to edit a .txt file (drag and drop the .txt file onto comskip.exe, press F1 for help)
Then post or mail me the generated .csv file together with your ini and the edited .txt file.
Then I will have a look how to improve you ini.
To ensure there are no timeline problems you can set
output_timing=1
and include the generated .timing.csv file.

[frankmcg]

Email sent. Thanks for taking the time to look at this.

[erik]

I checked the files you did send.
I renamed the .txt file to .ref assuming you have edited the file as requested to the correct commercial start and end numbers.
Then I did run comskip on the .csv file using the default ini file. In your ini file you have enabled "scene change", this is NOT the default and dangerous! Please set detect_method=43
Below you can see the result. The top black bars indicate the commercials as present in the .ref file.
The grey bars below indicate where Comskip has found the commercials.
As you can see all the detected commercials are within the boundaries of the real commercials as indicated by you.
All cuts are on black frames.

From your mail I understand that you experience a shift of all detected commercials in one direction.
This is possible when comskip and you video player do not agree on the timeline.
One way to solve this is to use the .edl output of comskip.
Could you test if this works?
Set
output_edl=1
and tell gbpvr to use the .edl file (I don't know how to do that)
Or could you create the timing file by setting
output_timing=1
?

[HtV]

and tell gbpvr to use the .edl file (I don't know how to do that

)

Look for this line in config.xml and make sure it says true.

Code:

<PreferComskipEDL>true</PreferComskipEDL>

I hope it works for you, for me it didn't, just try it out.
The problems I had were discussed here:
http://forums.nextpvr.com/showthread.php?t=23847&page=2

[frankmcg]

Thanks for all the help / suggestions. Have tried all the above but unfortunately it's still not working quite right. It seems to me that it's a GB-PVR problem rather than a comskip one though. For example, at the first ad break comskip is identifying the cut at frame 14414 (which looks like where it's cut on the image you pasted above), but when I actually play the file in GB-PVR it's cutting at more like frame 13900, a good 10/15 secs earlier!

For reference I'm attaching the unedited output files that comskip is now producing.

[erik]

Try to switch to using the output_edl=1
That may solve the problem.

[frankmcg]

I did do that, and made sure the option was on within GB-PVR (it was by default). Do the logs suggest that hasn't happened?

Also, is there any reason why the frames identified as commericals in the full log aren't the same as those in the short version? Eg the first commerical is identified as 14264 - 20340 at the bottom of the full output, but 14414 - 20190 in the summary version which I think is the one comskip actually uses? Was just wondering if that could be making a difference.