NPVR - Getting started, current patches, tips and tricks **!!!!PLEASE READ!!!!**

[nia]

Great job johnsonx42 - this is really a big help saving a lot of time looking through threads for individual patches. Thank you :-)

[agerdin]

johnsonx42,

Has this patch been added to your collection?

http://forums.nextpvr.com/showthread.php...post400601

\\Agerdin

[johnsonx42]

no, I didn't have that one. I don't have a PCH or MVP, and really don't understand how they work with NPVR/GB-PVR, so I never go in those forums. Thanks for the heads up, I'll add it to the patch list.

[mvallevand]

johnsonx42,

Has this patch been added to your collection?

http://forums.nextpvr.com/showthread.php...post400601

\\Agerdin

agerdin, I have continued to update NMTInstall2 to support updating of the NPVR patches I recommend with mvpmcx2 since it came out. If you have never used NMTInstall or NMTInstall2 it downloads, unzips, stops services and apps and install patches and restarts the recording service.

You can check the patches installed by NMTInstall on this link http://www.mvpmc.org/~mvallevand/NMTInstall.xml

Martin

[agerdin]

Johnsonx42,

There is a new patch available for PCH/NMT:

http://forums.nextpvr.com/showthread.php...post402258

\\Agerdin

[johnsonx42]

already in the list, patch #35

[johnsonx42]

Patch archive 1.5.36 Final posted. http://forums.gbpvr.com/attachment.php?a...1296521929

We're done with patches for 1.5.36.

[johnnysocko]

In case anyone finds it interesting, instructive, or amusing, here is my PostProcessing.bat for the purpose of running comskip. It runs no more than 2 comskips at once, and does a bit of logging into "processing.log".

Code:

@echo off

cd c:\comskip

echo %date%,%time% - PostProcessing.bat invoked on %1 recorded from channel %2 >>processing.log

Rem list of channels to not run comskip on; PBS channels have no commercials
if "%2" == "27" goto skip
if "%2" == "28" goto skip
if "%2" == "29" goto skip
if "%2" == "50" goto skip
if "%2" == "51" goto skip
if "%2" == "52" goto skip
if "%2" == "58" goto skip
if "%2" == "59" goto skip
if "%2" == "60" goto skip
if "%2" == "61" goto skip
goto next

:skip
echo skipping comskip on %1; channel %2 in skip list >>processing.log
goto continue

:next
rem need to add a pause to avoid race conditions
echo   ---  sleeping %2 seconds to avoid simultaneous execution >>processing.log
sleep %2

rem check how many comskips are running; if 2 or more are running wait 1 minute and check again
rem the third parameter passed in npvr 1.5.36 and later is a unique recording oid number, so it makes a good filename to store the temporary count
:check
tasklist | find /c "comskip" > %3.txt
set /p count= <%3.txt
if %count% geq 2 (
  echo ...%count% comskips running now, waiting 1 minute >>processing.log
  sleep 60
  goto check
)
del %3.txt

rem continuing now

Rem this trick also makes it possible to have dedicated comskip.ini file for certain channels.
rem if "%2" == "79" goto channel79
Rem use the default comskip.ini for all other channels
rem goto generic

rem :channel79
rem comskip --ini=channel79.ini %1
rem goto continue

:generic
echo %date%,%time% - invoking comskip on %1 >>processing.log
comskip %1
echo %date%,%time% - comskip finished with %1 >>processing.log

:continue

:eof

Some bits of it are left-overs from the sample gb-pvr postprocessing.bat included with comskip. I left them there in case I ever want to use them.

The bit where it sleeps for <channel number> (%2) seconds might introduce excessive waits for those with high 3-digit channel numbers; you'd probably have to implement it some other way. With the 1.5.36 update I've now switched to storing the temporary count in "%3.txt" where %3 is the recording ID number. This makes for a uniquely named file to store the temporary comskip count. I thought at first this would eliminate the need for the "sleep %2", since multiple postprocessing.bat files would each store their count in a unique file, but within just a couple of hours testing I saw a different race condition that resulted in too many comskips running at once so I restored the sleep. The use of the "%3" parameter still eliminates another race condition that sometimes resulted in no comskip running at all.

Additional non-comskip related commands would go after :continue.

This same file could be a ParallelProcessing.bat as well. In fact I wrote it initially for that use; the code to limit the number of comskips became necessary because I could easily get 4 comskips running at once - 2 finishing recordings that had just ended, and 2 for new recordings just begun. It was too much for my system. For other reasons though I opted not to run comskip in parallel, so I switched to PostProcessing. In PostProcessing I've yet to see more than 2 comskips actually try to run, but it could happen - consider two 2-hour movies followed by two 30-minute shows: comskip will probably still be running on both movies when the two half-hour shows finish and try to launch comskip.

The same basic code could be used for transcodes too; likewise you may not want too many transcodes running at once. tasklist | find /c "ffmpeg" > %3.txt seems reasonable, yes?

I almost forgot to mention, you will need the "sleep.exe" program from the Windows 2003 Resource Kit here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/detai...laylang=en. I thought of just attaching the sleep command to this message, but we don't want MS's goons coming after sub . Also, HarryH3 has pointed out that the "tasklist" command is not included with all versions of windows; see his post below to get it (Thanks Harry!): http://forums.gbpvr.com//showthread.php?...post388992

So, I didn't get any response to my own comskip issue, but if you wouldn't mind - could you also share the processing details related to your own working "comclean" post comskip, johnsonx42? That would probably be helpful.

[johnsonx42]

Sorry, what you see in that example is all I do. I've never used comclean and likely never will. You probably didn't get any response because very few people, if any, are trying to do the sort of processing you're doing.

[mvallevand]

To add to what johnsonx42 wrote, NPVR includes more sophisticated skipping techniques than used in GBPVR which you lose by cutting commercials or converting to mpeg-ps format as some people do. If you use NextPVR for watching your videos comskip should be more than good enough, if you leave the files as-is. If comskip was 100% accurate comclean would make some sense for archival, but I find it often leaves a commercial behind so it is only half "clean", which is when accurate skipping is important.

Martin