Comskip for Dummies

[Pioneer4x4]

I haven't noticed many times where comskip incorrectly marks something as a commercial. It might miss some, but vary rarely will it ever mark part of a show as a commercial. I wouldn't mind an autoskip, but just hitting play is nice. I guess I just need to chop the commercials from my mpegs.

[dwestbrook]

auto skip would be a nice option, however what if a skip is in the wrong position, and you rewind, say 2 seconds before the skip point, it will automatically skip to the end of the commerical, and you could never (well not easily) be able to see the part just after the skip point.

I really like the ReplayTV implementation of commercial autoskip, which solves/avoids those kinds of issues. When it got to the start of a commercial break, it would skip to the end of break, and during the skip (and a tad after) it would show an icon (kinda like a play button w/a circular arrow around it) on the corner of the screen so you knew that the auto skip just kicked in and did its thing.
The ReplayTV remote had a specific button for toggling on/off the commerical autoskip on the fly (when you hit it, a OSD message would say "commerical skip now on/off"). This way if it it autoskips and you know you missed something, you just toggle it off and then rewind normally (toggling autoskip back on while in a break skipped to the end--just like the current play button behavior in gbpvr). Or if you want to watch all commercials just toggle it off to begin with (a config option could set if it starts on or off by default).

comskip isnt reliable enough for auto skip, as simple as that.

For the the 10 or so shows i watch i don't think i've had any false positives (skipping actual show).. the occaisional false negative (showing commercial), but nothing a push of the 30 or 60 second skip button doesn't fix...

--david

[Pioneer4x4]

For the the 10 or so shows i watch i don't think i've had any false positives (skipping actual show).. the occaisional false negative (showing commercial), but nothing a push of the 30 or 60 second skip button doesn't fix...

--david

I agree completely, I just thought of 1 other thing I was thinking about comskip. I wish there was a way to flag certain channels, and not have comskip run on shows from them. Like, why have comskip running on movies that don't have commercials. When that happens, I just go to taskmanager, and kill comskip, then delete the incomplete files.

[Bucko]

If back-to-back recordings are scheduled, does ComSkip run after both recordings are completed or does it run once after the first program is recorded and again after the second completes? As it takes high CPU cycles, I hope it only runs after both programs are recorded. Thanks!

[numatrix]

You could use the -n option to comskip. That tells it to run with a lower priority, hopefully not chugging the CPU so much. Of course, at that point, it's the disk read/writes that are more likely to cause problems (if you're recording another show, comskip is running, and you try to do anything with the machine, you're loading the HD pretty heavily), so it might still be a good idea to have some sort of batch or delay. Of course, you could always write a pretty simple wsh script of some sort that was run nightly at a certain time that would find directories with .mpg files in them that don't have equivalent .txt commercial files and run comskip them. Hmm, that'd be a good feature for one of the existing plugins actually. A nightly comskip scan. Not sure what the best plugin for it would be though, or maybe just an option to gbpvr itself.

[Pioneer4x4]

If back-to-back recordings are scheduled, does ComSkip run after both recordings are completed or does it run once after the first program is recorded and again after the second completes? As it takes high CPU cycles, I hope it only runs after both programs are recorded. Thanks!

On my computer, I believe it runs after each show. You will se 100% CPU use, with comskip running, but the important thing is it runs in low priority mode. In task manager, go to <View>, then <Select Columns> then check "Base Priority". There have been times when I manually ran 3 or more copies of comskip. I would give one of them a slightly higher priority than the others, and it would use the availably CPU, and the others would sit at 0%. Just because you see the CPU at 100% doesn't mean that you can't do anything else.

Basically what I am saying is everything works fine with comskip running in the background. It will just use whatever CPU clock are free from other tasks.

It usually takes my computer (P4 2GHZ) about 6-7 min for a 30 min show to complete ComSkip. But if I am doing other things while comskip is running, it might take 20 min.

[AOSandman]

If back-to-back recordings are scheduled, does ComSkip run after both recordings are completed or does it run once after the first program is recorded and again after the second completes? As it takes high CPU cycles, I hope it only runs after both programs are recorded. Thanks!

It runs at the end of each recording, but from what I've seen it processes the recordings sequentially so you don't end up with 2 or more getting processed at the same time.

I added -n to my postprocessing.bat so that Comskip always runs in playnice mode. It takes longer to process the recordings, but the CPU utilization stays low and other recordings don't get messed up. I almost never watch a program right after it finishes recording, so the longer processing time doesn't matter for me.

[AOSandman]

...it might still be a good idea to have some sort of batch or delay. Of course, you could always write a pretty simple wsh script of some sort that was run nightly at a certain time that would find directories with .mpg files in them that don't have equivalent .txt commercial files and run comskip them. Hmm, that'd be a good feature for one of the existing plugins actually. A nightly comskip scan. Not sure what the best plugin for it would be though, or maybe just an option to gbpvr itself.

I actually just wrote a small utility that does that. It simply reads the file names from a flat text file and runs comskip on each one sequentially. I used it to process a bunch of older recordings, but it could just as easily be used to run comskip on a schedule instead of immediately after each recording.

[Bucko]

Thanks for all of the advice! I have added the playnice features to ComSkip and will check out the performance.

[wtg]

I agree completely, I just thought of 1 other thing I was thinking about comskip. I wish there was a way to flag certain channels, and not have comskip run on shows from them. Like, why have comskip running on movies that don't have commercials. When that happens, I just go to taskmanager, and kill comskip, then delete the incomplete files.

Actually, I'll be working on a script this week to do just that, something that can run in postprocessing.bat. If it hadn't been for March madness, it'd already be done but there was just too much basketball this weekend.

In my case I don't want Comskip to run if the recording came from a channel greater than 100 since on my cable network that'll be a premium channel that doesn't have commercials, but I figured I'd create a command line option or an INI file where you can specify channels that have commercials and if the recording is made on one of those, it'll return one status code and if not, it'll return a different one.

In any event I'll post the result when I have it working.