Advice: ComSKip and Transcoding on Second PC?

[HtV]

When you do it parallel it can only go as fast as the show goes, so cpu use will be quite low and stable. If you do it afterwards it might finish a 1 hr show in maybe 10 mins but it will be taking as much cpu power as it is allowed.

[dvasco]

Eric,Thank you for authoring comskip... it's truly changed my TV viewing habits as I rarely watch anything live anymore because of the commercials.

Same here, although it really started with a ReplayTV 2020 with quickskip and autoskip on the 5040. However, GBPVR with comskip is better in many aspects.

[erik]

erik, there's two instances in this thread where you've suggested that, if one has the CPU power, it's much better to run comskip concurrently with the recording process rather than after the recording has finished.

Am I reading that correctly?

Thank you for authoring comskip... it's truly changed my TV viewing habits as I rarely watch anything live anymore because of the commercials.

Its rather complex.
Comskip running concurrently with a recording creates a very low system load.
This because the file is written rather slow so comskip neatly throttles back.
Running comskip concurrently with copying a recording is not a good idea. This because copying a file goes much faster then recording and comskip reading the file while its still being copied causes a lot of extra head movements slowing down the copy. The extra head movement is there also when comskip processes a file concurrent to a recording but the recording writes so slow to the disk that the extra head movements do not cause any problem.
Its all about avoiding extra load, leading to inefficiency and performance breakdown, in high load situations

[zehd]

Its rather complex.
Comskip running concurrently with a recording creates a very low system load.
This because the file is written rather slow so comskip neatly throttles back.
Running comskip concurrently with copying a recording is not a good idea. This because copying a file goes much faster then recording and comskip reading the file while its still being copied causes a lot of extra head movements slowing down the copy. The extra head movement is there also when comskip processes a file concurrent to a recording but the recording writes so slow to the disk that the extra head movements do not cause any problem.
Its all about avoiding extra load, leading to inefficiency and performance breakdown, in high load situations

until this version, my onlne pVR wasn't able to have two comskips run in parallel.
I couldn't do anything else, like watch a show local or on MVP, or surf...

But this version is just brilliant. And I swear the default ini catches more commercials then before...

Really good work erik

[David]

I use a little utility called psexec to kick off a batch file on a second PC. Specifically, I ask my UPnP media server to re-index my recordings directory network share so I don't have to wait for the daily scheduled re-indexing. I am sure something could be rigged up to run comskip and transcoding remotely. The local batch file should not have utilities that depend on the file being processed; running renamerecording/addeppisode would not be good.

You could use semaphor files for flow control between systems, but you would need to be careful about tying the two batch files together though, since failure of the remote process could leave the local batch file "hung" as it waited indefinitely to move on.

My comskip and commercial cutting takes place on my GB-PVR box, which seems to be standard practice. Postprocessing.bat is pretty smart about delaying processing until GB-PVR is not recording. That still sounds like the best route in most cases.

[-stattik-]

Hi nurowolf,

I have the same requirements as you. Although I run parellelprocessing.bat with comskip, I transcode everything from another PC.

I created a script for this that you can customize. You can run comskip from it as well and it's automated.

http://gbpvr.com/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Utili...anscodeCut

[David]

Although I run parellelprocessing.bat with comskip, I transcode everything from another PC.

I created a script for this that you can customize. You can run comskip from it as well and it's automated.

stattik,

I've looked through your script in the past, and even printed a copy of it for future reference, as it does some very interesting things. It turned out to be more complex than I needed, so never actually implemented it. I think I stole a line or two though for my processing.

I don't remember it having anything to kick off the script on a remote machine. And, I haven't gone back to read through your current version. How are you getting the remote system to start processing?

[-stattik-]

stattik,
How are you getting the remote system to start processing?

There's 4 options to set in the Quickstart section. The section below that is the automatic transcoding section. Set secondary_transcode_directory to the network directory that has the recordings (no spaces). Set comskipmode=yes if you want comskip running as well.

Then double-click the script and it will scan the remote directory and queue up the shows. When it's done with the last show, it will sleep for 30mins, and then run again (the sleep time is customizable).

I run the script minimized pretty much all the time. Alternately you could just run the script late at night via a windows task but it never really gets in the way.

Post with any questions.

[David]

Final question. The script is set to scan sub-folders on the remote directory?

PSExec might be a good solution for kicking off the remote script as needed from post/parallelprocessing.bat.

[-stattik-]

Final question. The script is set to scan sub-folders on the remote directory?

Yes, secondary_transcode_directory will check all subdirectories.