Comclean plugin : automatic deletion of commercials

[rvtazdevil]

Ok, I am uncertain on how these programs all tie together and what you need to do to get them to work correctly... I was unable to find instructions that "tie" them all together.

I have downloaded and installed ComSkip. I can now skip commercials. I found ComClean doing a search which is suppose to call ComSkip to clean up my recordings after record. The install appears to be straight forward. I am curious though on how the recording process calls on the postprocessing.bat file?

Thanks in advance!
Rick

[erik]

postprocessing.bat is called after each recoding when gbpvr is finished with one parameter, the fully qualified filename of the .mpg file of the just finished recording.
In postprocessing.bat you then can do whatever you want with the just finished recording.
E.g.

Find the commercials
comskip %1

This generates a .txt file with the same name in the same directory as the .mpg file containing the cutpoints for the commercials.

delete the found commercials
call comclean %1
This reads the .txt file generated by comskip and cuts the commercials from the .mpg file.
It creates a backup file containing the original .mpg file.

Hope this helps

[rvtazdevil]

Thanks for your help. I am assuming that this postprocessing.bat file goes in the main gbpvr directory? Also, I don't have to do anything special to make sure the postprocessing.bat file is called?

Thanks!

Rick

[erik]

All correct!

Please consult the wiki at http://www.bladerhq.com/pmwiki/pmwiki.php for more info

[reboot]

rvtazdevil:
If you have these plugins (all available in this forum somewhere, or on the Wiki):
1 RenameRecording
2 Comskip
3 Comclean
GB-PVR will identify the commercials, edit them out of the recording, and then rename the file to the episode name automatically.
Here is my postprocessing.bat:

Comskip %1
call comclean %1
RenameRecordings %1

This is using version 0.0.1 of comclean, downloadable just above in Erik's post.

NOTE to Tipster: Please put RenameRecordingS on the wiki!
It's impossible to find buried in that 11 page thread.

[jorm]

I am putting a hook in xrecord that will invoke a batch file on archive. So you can cut on archive if you did not want to do it in post processing.

[ydekmekji]

1. If comskip accidentally identifies a scene as a commercial when in fact it's not, then it will be cut using this program?

2. Comskip doesn't catch all the commercials yet, which means that some commercials will not be cut?

3. What about a program that allows you to skip to every commercial and it asks you, "should i cut this?"

I don't think it's possible to do real commercial cutting automatically unless the producers of the shows have a database online of where (which frames) are the commercials. Then, it would be easy...

[King Mob]

I was thinking along the same lines as Ydekmekji, rather than have the commercials edited out in post, can you make it so gbpvr just automatically skips them in playback? And then have the option when archiving to either automatically edit the commercials, or be prompted to have the commercials cut. My thinking is that for most programming, which is just watched and deleted, having the commercials automatically skipped is enough. I would only want to actually edit stuff I planned on keeping.

[erik]

If you have gbpvr in your living room or when using it with MPV or PC based playback its better to skip the commercials while watching.
Gbpvr can do that using the comskip generated .txt file, also zoomplayer can do that on any PC using the the zoomplayer skip file that comskip can generate.
But.....
I am using gbpvr on my centrall server, locked away somewhere else in the home.
And I do playback using an SL400i (networked media player (using UPnP) playing back mp3, Mpeg2, mpeg4 and DIVX).
I let my UPnP media server watch the directory where gbpvr puts the recording.
In this way I can watch my films and the newly recorded programs via the SL400i.
The SL can however not skip like zoomplayer or gbpvr can so I used to run comskip and then used MPEG-VCR to cut out the commercials (show/commercial time ratio is about 3/1 on some stations)
My family realy likes watching films and series this way.
But cutting with MPEG-VCR requires me to manually intervene while for some shows comskip is very reliable. Therefore I prefer the solution from reboot.
Automatically cut out the commercials and keep the _original.mpg file.
For most of the series its perfect (and I don't care about some seconds of commercials, its better then 7 minutes) and comskip has almost no "false positives".
For things you want to keep you can use the clean file and use any manual cutter and the list of cutpoints as listed in the comclean log to cut out the last commercials frames. Or if comskip failed, revert to the original file and do it all manually.
Diskspace is not realy a problem anymore

[reboot]

@ Tipstir, I mean that the wiki only seems to have the old renamerecording, not the version posted with the "S" on the end (which works much better), that I downloaded from the middle of the thread.

I dont' know about your cable co, or the stations/programs you're recording, but comclean works perfectly. It's comskip that has troubles with some shows.
If you edit the comskip.ini file, you can specify the different methods it uses to identify commercials. You can also add to it's database dictionary, to improve it's reliability.
Erik has done a superb job on this plugin, and it's too bad nobody want's to take up the reigns on comskip, because it would also be superb, with a little tweaking.