Removing commercials from recordings

[Ted the Penguin]

if you use comskip it will just create a file which marks the commercials, and GB-PVR will understand that automatically. it has always done a good job for me, Havnt missed a show recently. but if it does mess up, you can just skip back, and it will be fine.

now comcut... ok so it works, kinda. it seriously mames the timestamps of the file, and maybe other stuff. if you are only cutting the commercials and watching the MPEG, there is a good chance that it will jump around the file randomly at commercial points. some people say that the retime utility can fix this, but its not gauranteed. YMMV. however if you are transcoding after you cut the commercials (I am not sure about burning a DVD) then it will be fine, because the messed up timestamps wont really affect anything.

hope that helped

[pastro]

if you use comskip it will just create a file which marks the commercials, and GB-PVR will understand that automatically. it has always done a good job for me, Havnt missed a show recently. but if it does mess up, you can just skip back, and it will be fine.

now comcut... ok so it works, kinda. it seriously mames the timestamps of the file, and maybe other stuff. if you are only cutting the commercials and watching the MPEG, there is a good chance that it will jump around the file randomly at commercial points. some people say that the retime utility can fix this, but its not gauranteed. YMMV. however if you are transcoding after you cut the commercials (I am not sure about burning a DVD) then it will be fine, because the messed up timestamps wont really affect anything.

hope that helped

Comcut does a retime. When I have cut with comclean I have all sorts of retiming problems. With Comcut my timelines at least on dvd and in GBPVR look good.

[jim08127]

Comclean2.bat which contains commands to demux, then cut with cuttermaran and finally remux, seems to do a decent job quality wise. I have just started using it. But it can cut on I frames and you can't see the cut later or easily see it, especially if you tuned the cut placement with the reviewing tool.

And I am impressed with comskips abilities to detect commercials but if you are going to actually make the permanent cuts you will want to use the comskip reviewing/editing tool to double check the commercial marks before cutting. Nice tool, makes the job quick and easy.

If you want to try this, then download comskip, comclean2, and cuttermaran, I'd be glad to help if you have any questions.

When you put comskip in the gbpvr directory, it automatically marks commercials right after recording and stores this in a separate txt file. gbpvr reads this txt file whenever you play back the file.

There is a comskip ini file where you specify the additional output formats you want, for instance if you know you will be using videoredo or cuttermaran etc, it will spit out a file they can read in addition to the txt file.

comskip: http://www.kaashoek.com/comskip/

cuttermaran: http://www.videohelp.com/tools?tool=531

[ApexHack]

I always cut commericals myself... I guess ive never trusted the detector programs. How well do these work at removing commercials anyhow? Ever miss any show?

I've been using comskip for a quite a while now and I have to say it is very good. The mistakes it makes are usually, ~99%+, on the safe side where a bit of commercial gets left in. The one thing it does pretty consistently is cut off the previews of the following show though, which doesn't bother me much.

I'm using videoredo to make the cuts automatically, but I leave the original in a folder accessible from the video library just in case. It does take some manual maintenance to keep things under control, and does almost double the required space, but its great when you have 3/4 of a 320GB drive free .

Cheers

[tiger66]

Hi,

IMHO, ComCut is the best. If you run it without filenames, it allows you to set up options for the tools to use to do the work. It uses comskip to mark the commercial points, and then cutterman or mpgtx to remove the commercials and mplex1 to remux the file so there are no timestamp issues. It works flawlessly for me.

Just my two cents,
Tiger66