ComSkip question

[jd1940]

I'm running the Johnson42 comskip batch file and everything is working fine EXCEPT everyone of the programs is experiencing a 30 minute delay before processing starts. I'm listing the batch file below in the hope someone will see some setting I've gotten wrong that would cause this:

@echo off

cd /d 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" == "2008" goto eof
if "%2" == "2078" goto eof
if "%2" == "2091" goto eof
if "%2" == "2092" goto eof
if "%2" == "2093" goto eof
if "%2" == "2094" goto eof
if "%2" == "2095" goto eof
if "%2" == "2096" goto eof
if "%2" == "2097" goto eof
goto next

kip
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

[sub]

PostProcessing.bat is run as soon as the recording completes.

Maybe look around the middle of your batch files, where you're doing logic to limit the maximum number of concurrent instances of comskip.

[Reddwarf]

You are sleeping <channelnumber> of seconds before processing starts, so if you have high channelnumbers you have a long sleep . I changed mine to 15 seconds.

[sub]

Ah true - didn't notice that.

[jd1940]

Yes, that would do it. All of these channels are in the 2000 range. So, I should change sleeping %2 seconds to 15 seconds?

Edit: Upon reflection it looks as if I should change the line right below the one I just listed to-- sleep 15

[Reddwarf]

Yes, that would do it. All of these channels are in the 2000 range. So, I should change sleeping %2 seconds to 15 seconds?

Edit: Upon reflection it looks as if I should change the line right below the one I just listed to-- sleep 15

That's what I did.

[johnsonx42]

the sleep is meant to make sure simultaneous recordings on different channels don't start processing at exactly the same time. I originally put it in there to work around some race-conditions I was seeing, but it may no longer be necessary. sleeping for 15 seconds before starting is probably a good idea anyway, just to let the recording get started cleanly and wait for additional recordings being started at the same time to settle in as well.

for anyone else reading along, note that the sleep command is not part of windows, it came from the Windows NT Resource Kit. Modern versions of Windows now have the "timeout" command built-in which you can use in place of sleep.

[johnsonx42]

here's the current version that I run as parallelprocessing.bat; not much difference that I can see. it does put the logging in the scripts directory (%~dp0) even though it's running in the comskip directory. sometimes I like that, sometimes I don't. I made the logging a little more verbose in spots, I rarely look at it but every now and then it helps (though conversely I seem to have decided I don't always want to see the full path name of the recording file, even though I have 3 recording locations? that seems odd). I guess I ought to update that list of PBS channels, I use major.minor channel numbers now so most of them are wrong.
the other change is that I dump the runtime stdout of comskip to %3.log. from time to time I've had problems with comskip, so it's been useful a times to go see what it dumped to stdout; yes, the files do pile up in the scripts directory, I periodically delete them but it would take probably 100 years of recordings before the accumulated log files would actually cause a problem.

Code:

@echo off

cd c:\users\public\npvr\comskip

echo %date%,%time% - %~n1 (%3) recording from channel %2 on tuner %4 >>"%~dp0\recording.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" == "53" 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 %~n1; channel %2 in skip list >>"%~dp0\recording.log"
goto continue

:next
echo   ---  sleeping %2 seconds to avoid simultaneous execution >>"%~dp0\recording.log"
sleep %2

:check
tasklist | find /c "comskip" > %3.txt
set /p count= <%3.txt
if %count% geq 3 (
  echo ...%count% comskips running now, waiting 1 minute >>"%~dp0\recording.log"
  sleep 60
  goto check
)
del %3.txt

rem continuing now

:generic
echo %date%,%time% - invoking comskip on %1 (%3)>>"%~dp0\recording.log"
comskip %1 >>"%~dp0\%3.log"
echo %date%,%time% - comskip finished with %1 (%3)>>"%~dp0\recording.log"

:continue

rem there was logic here to rename the recording, but now that NPVR uses S01E01 style naming it's all gone

:eof

[jd1940]

Thanks to everyone for the help. All is working fine now.