Commercial Detection

[colin]

Hey Jorm,

what country are you testing programs from? I'll be looking at US based programs and I think Codemonkey will be the same.

Colin.

[jorm]

I am located in the United States as well.  However if I keep getting hit by hurricanes maybe I will look for someplace safer!

I will send the executable to colin and codemonkey.  I do not have a web site to post files too.

So this is what I have tested so far.
The West Wing from 11am on Tuesday.
There were 4 commercial breaks it detected each of them.  In one of the breaks it missed the first commercial but correctly caught the other 3.

Scrubs 9:30 Tue
Caught all of the commercials (3 commercial breaks).  If the recording starts on a commercial it is not going to catch it.  On this I noticed that when the show ends and you have a commercial then the credits it cuts out the credits.  Which it is not part of the shows content anyway.

Football game Tues 10pm, Ment to tape Nip/Tuck
There were 9 commercial breaks, it caught 8 of them.

So far it does not look to bad for american content.

[jorm]

When you run comskip the text file it generates you want the last section everything below the last row of -----.


So far I got one drama, 1 sitcom, and 1 football not bad.

[colin]

Just tried "Thats 70s Show" and comskip was pretty accurate. It picked up the 2 main comercial breaks, but missed the credits section - no biggie really. I'm now trynig various settings to see what happens. This was from Fox

Next i'll try something from the WB,

Sub, would it worth considering putting in support for files created by comskip? Eg. if the .txt file is detected then the skip buttons make reference to the frame numbers?

Colin.

[sub]

If the consensus is 'it seems to work', then I'll add some support for loading in this file of skip points. It sounding positive.

I might have picked a bad couple of shows when I tried it.

[colin]

Well it certainly gives us some scope to play with and gives us a kick start into trying a few things,

Colin.

[colin]

Ok, just tried this with a show of WB22 - Everybody Loves Raymond and it correctly picked up the 3 commercial breaks. Would be interesting to try a show from a another country.

If anyone has a 30 minute show from outside the US and is interested in giving me access to it PM me (you may want to have a fast connection

Colin.

[jorm]

so far I am fairly impressed with it. Colin I also saw that it removed the credits as well. I am not sure if that is by design, but it is fine with me.

Support for the config files would be great.

I still have been looking around for a freeware command line program that will allow me to separate mpeg2 video either by frame position or time.

That way if you want to burn the videos to dvd it will clip out 95% of the commercials for you. I will test it with more shows and post it here as I tape them.

[CodeMonkey]

I am in the states as well.

So you guys didn't buld it, just grabbed the executable?

I grabbed the source a short while ago, but didnt get around to building it. I'm already on hour 12 of my work day and counting, so I doubt I will get to it tonight. But I will try and get it to build soon and post a link to the source for you guys to grab.

[colin]

yeah just grabbed the exe. I need to see if i have a free compiler on my machine to build with - or maybe someone can point me to one?

Cheers,
Colin.