Commercial Detection

[jorm]

The author is aware of the bug with a space in the mpeg filename and hopefully will be fixed soon.

[web_maven]

Jumping in late;

I believe there is a signal that is transmitted just before a commercial appears. This signal is to inform Subsidiaries that they are going to commercial and can run local Advertisements.

Every watch CSI in the NYC area (USA Based show) and see Advertisements for a local restaurant. Well in CA your not going to get an Advertisement for a restaurant in NYC.

I believe the signal is carried on the Subtitle stream. The Subtitle is used for a lot of different data streams.

Raymond

[jorm]

We are not writing the commercial detection that is 3rd party freeware. There used to be a signal and some stations still use it but when the first VCR came out with comskip I believe it has been removed. The algorthim seems to be pretty accurate in the last version. I have not tested this one yet.

[Jason]

Comskip 0.31 has been released. It is simply a minor bugfix to allow spaces in the path(s) to hold spaces.

http://forums.freytechnologies.com/forums....unt=253

-Jason

[jorm]

If anyone gets a chance download comskip and run it on a couple of your recordings you can check the results with Virtualdub.

Post your findings here. How accurate was it, did it catch all of the commercials, what did you record and what country you are in.

We need to show that this algorithm is working before we convince sub to support it. We have had good luck with past versions.

[PVR(SWE)]

Tell me what to download, and how to install (if it's hard to install). And I will try it. I live in Sweden (Stockholm and use the UPC's basic analog service).
Cheers
/Jonas

[jorm]

If you look at jason's post he has a link click on it download the comskip.0.31.zip and unzip it. There are two files an exe and an ini. To run it type comskip <full path to the mpeg>

for example comskip f:\movies\NipTuck\Nip.mpg

It will run and create a text file with the same name as the mpeg. Open the text file and at the bottom you will see a divider of "---------"

Each line below the divider has two numbers these are the frame offsets for the commercial start and end.

We are trying to make sure it does not cut into the movie.

Install virtualdub and open the mpeg. Move the progress bar over till you hit the frame that was detected and make sure it really is a commercial.

They post how many commercials it found out of how many.

Jorm

[nkh]

I have tested v0.31 on a couple of recordings. It's tested on my VIA M10000 (@1066MHz with 256MB ram, but running irc, browser, jalcds, antivirus, mbm5 and gbpvr service at the same time). All recordings made at 2500 Kbits/sec with GBpvr and a PVR350. The only setting I changed in the ini file was fps=25 for PAL.

---(1)
file: Becker_20040923_13301400.mpg - No commercial breakes in the show itself.
recorded from norwegian TV2, 32:49 min, processed in 517.51 seconds (95.21fps).

1 4186 - Commercials
4816 6182 - Commercials, program info and start credits
18350 21605 - Mistakenly marked as commercials, probably because the original show has room for commercials at these points
27193 29479 - See above
37260 38600 - Last scene and closing credits
39697 41207 - Commercials
42088 47051 - Commercials, program info and start credits from the following show

---(2)
file: Becker_20040924_13301400.mpg - No commercial breakes in the show itself.
recorded from norwegian TV2, 32:55 min, processed in 615:72 seconds (80.00fps).

5 5525 - Commercials, program info and start credits
19427 23834 - Mistakenly marked as commercials, probably because the original show has room for commercials at these points. Onwards from 23834 to the end, containing the rest of the program, commercials, program info and start credits from the following show

---(3)
file: Becker_20040927_13301400.mpg - No commercial breakes in the show itself.
recorded from norwegian TV2, 32:49 min, processed in 566.81 seconds (86.90fps).

1 7016 - Commercials, program info, start credits and the first 2500 frames of the show

---(4)
file: Becker_20040928_13301400.mpg - No commercial breakes in the show itself.
recorded from norwegian TV2, 32:55 min, processed in 539.49 seconds (91.53fps).

3 5439 - Commercials, program info and start credits. Onwards from 5439 to the end, containing the rest of the program, commercials, program info and start credits from the following show
---

So, it catches most of the commercials and some more. If there were an option to "skip to next comskip point" in GBpvr then it would be very usefull, then you can just skip when you see the start of the commercial breaks and the false breakes it discovers would go on unnoticed. It would be even better if these points were marked out in the progressbar on the OSD so you could see if the next point is realistic or not.

I'll be doing some more testing (prefereble with shows with commercials in the show itself), but overall I'm quite impressed. It's also nice that it runs quite quickly (under 10min for a 30min show) even on a slow machine like mine.

[jorm]

The author has requested that if you see it cut into the show follow the following steps.

If comskip doesn't work 100% for you, I would appreciate it if you would follow this procedure:
Change the comskip.ini verbose to "verbose=10".
Run comskip on the trouble mpg.
Email the resultant .log file along with an explanation of the problem (i.e. It didn't mark a commercial from 4:56 to 5:34) to jere@sage-community.org
Wait for feedback and/or updated comskip.
If even a few people do that with a wide enough variety of shows, I think we can have comskip up to 99.9% effectiveness.

[nkh]

okay, I'll try that later. I was just posting here to show that if a skip function is added to gbpvr then it'll work nicely even with this version.