Ideal system

[sheppy99]

I have a server running at my base that I want to use to do the following:

Schedule remote freeview recording
Delete Commercials
Compress with no loss of quality
FTP at a controlled rate to a server elsewhere

This is so I can watch TV whilst I'm away on holidays.

Hardware: Dual Core Windows Server 2003 running SBS with 4GB RAM and Hauppauge HVR1100 or NovaTD Stick.

So far I've experimented with GBPVR and the HVR1100, for plain recording from the HVR1100 the results are excellent.
However it isn't skipping the commercials, Comskip is creating the txt files but the actual cutting isn't happening. I've copied comclean2.bat, bbdmux.exe and mplex2.exe as well as created a postprocessing.bat.

Can someone help me with the commercial skipping as well as offer any suggestions on the rest of my project?

Thanks
S

[Snooze]

Have you seen the Enhanced Web Administrator on the Wiki (EWA)? It works very well and you wouldn't have to go through a lot of trouble.

I never used comclean2.bat, just the "standard" comskip and haven't any troubles with it. I googled comclean2.bat and I found this instruction page. Hope it helps! http://www.fungii.com/archives/001048.html

[gEd]

I would be surprised (and delighted) if you get comskip to work so reliably with UK recordings that you will be able to use the output from comskip to reliably cut the recording without loosing some of the programme.

as Snooze said, EWA is a good way of viewing recordings remotely.

[sheppy99]

Thanks Snooze & gEd, that gives me a couple of useful pointers. Just managed to get the guide working - excellent!
Will work on the commercials and let you know how I get on

[martint123]

When you compare US and UK TV the transition between shows and commercials is (was?) very easy to spot. The UK is a much smoother transition and I've never managed to get comskip to work reliably in the UK.

[sheppy99]

Well so far I can't get mine to snip anything :-(
Still will keep googling and playing with it..

[CornStopper]

When you compare US and UK TV the transition between shows and commercials is (was?) very easy to spot. The UK is a much smoother transition and I've never managed to get comskip to work reliably in the UK.

Have to say, I have the same problem. I tweaked the parameters and recorded a programme and all is fine. But when I record another programme from a different channel, the com skips are all over the place.

As for cutting out the commercials, never moved onto this stage as I could not get com skip working perfectly.

If I want to keep a show, I manually cut out the commercials, and then compress it to xvid/divx avi.

[JonnyCam]

But when I record another programme from a different channel, the com skips are all over the place.

I think you can actually pass the channel to comskip, and have different profiles for each channel. (if you can be bothered)

[gEd]

Indeed you can. In fact comskip comes with a postprocessing.bat file that has this funtionality built in.

so you could set it to not bother running comskip on BBC* channels, given that there are no ads, unless you want to get it to mark the start and end of the show.

This is really turning into a UK comskip tuning post. perhaps we should share our comskip.ini files.

here's what I use. sometime it works perfectly but i've not bothered spending any time tuning it because like martin said, the UK actively make it difficult to detect ads and it's easy enough to just skip over them.

Code:

detect_method=111         ;1=black frame, 2=logo, 4=scene change, 8=fuzzy logic, 16=closed captions, 32=aspect ration, 64=silence, 128=cutscenes, 255=all
validate_silence=1         ; Default, set to 0 to force using this clues if selected above.
validate_uniform=1         ; Default, set to 0 to force using this clues (like pure white frames) if blackframe is selected above.
validate_scenechange=1      ; Default, set to 0 to force using this clues if selected above.
verbose=0            ;show a lot of extra info, level 5 is also OK, set to 0 to disable
max_brightness=60               ;frame not black if any pixels checked are greater than this (scale 0 to 255)
test_brightness=40            ;frame not pure black if any pixels checked are greater than this, will check average brightness (scale 0 to 255)
max_avg_brightness=25         ;maximum average brightness for a dim frame to be considered black (scale 0 to 255) 0 means autosetting
max_commercialbreak=600       ;maximum length in seconds to consider a segment a commercial break
min_commercialbreak=25         ;minimum length in seconds to consider a segment a commercial break
max_commercial_size=155         ;maximum time in seconds for a single commercial or multiple commercials if no breaks in between
min_commercial_size=4         ;mimimum time in seconds for a single commercial
min_show_segment_length=155    ; any segment longer than this will be scored towards show.
non_uniformity=1500         ; Set to 0 to disable cutpoints based on uniform frames
max_volume=500            ; any frame with sound volume larger than this will not be regarded as black frame
min_silence=20            ; Any deep silence longer than this amount  of frames is a possible cutpoint
ticker_tape=0            ; Amount of pixels from bottom to ignore in all processing
logo_at_bottom=0         ; Set to 1 to search only for logo at the lower half of the video, do not combine with subtitle setting
punish=4               ; Compare to average for sum of 1=brightness, 2=uniform 4=volume, 8=silence, 16=schange, set to 0 to disable
punish_threshold=1.3      ; Multiply when amount is above average * punish_threshold
punish_modifier=2         ; When above average * threshold multiply score by this value
intelligent_brightness=0       ; Set to 1 to use a USA specific algorithm to tune some of the settings, not adviced outside the USA
logo_percentile=0.92         ; if more then this amount of logo is found then logo detection will be disabled
logo_threshold=0.75
punish_no_logo=1         ; Default, set to 0 to avoid show segments without logo to be scored towards commercial
aggressive_logo_rejection=0
connect_blocks_with_logo=1      ; set to 1 if you want successive blocks with logo on the transition to be regarded as connected, set to 0 to disable
cut_on_ar_change=0         ; set to 1 if you want to cut also on aspect ratio changes when logo is present, set to 2 to force cuts on aspect ratio changes. set to 0 to disable
delete_show_after_last_commercial=0   ; set to 1 if you want to delete the last block if its a show and after a commercial
delete_show_before_or_after_current=0   ; set to 1 if you want to delete the previous and the next show in the recording, this can lead to the deletion of trailers of next show
delete_block_after_commercial=0   ;set to max size of block in seconds to be discarded, set to 0 to disable
remove_before=4            ; amount of seconds of show to be removed before ALL commercials
remove_after=4            ; amount of seconds of show to be removed after ALL commercials
shrink_logo=5            ; Reduce the duration of the logo with this amount of seconds
after_logo=0      ; set to number of seconds after logo disappears comskip should start to search for silence to insert an additional cutpoint
padding=0
ms_audio_delay=5
volume_slip=20
skip_b_frames=0                ; Set to 1 to force Comskip to skip frames for higher processing speed.
max_repair_size=200            ; Will repair maximum 200 missing MPEG frames in the timeline, set to 0 to disable repairing for players that don't use PTS.
disable_heuristics=4        bit pattern for disabling heuristics, adding 1 disables heristics 1, adding 2 disables heristics 2, adding 4 disables heristics 3, 255  disables all heuristics
delete_logo_file=1

[sheppy99]

Thanks for the info guys, I've now got the remote programming, ad sniping using videoredo, and then a further step of splitting the resulting file into 25MB chunks using a program called "gsplit" I found on the web. Now I need to fine tune it and setup an auto FTP to copy it whenever I'm online.
All in all a very impressive program once you get back into the command line way of doing things - watch this space for more developments :-)