SA, Comclean, RenameRecordings...

[Jere_Jones]

You know, I thought the start /wait would surely work so I never even tested it. It works great if there are no arguments to pass, but not at all if there are. So, I started thinking about writting a stub program that would run SA and wait for it to finish before returning...

(cue drum roll)

Turns out that I already have! Just use the comskip proxy. What everyone here is trying to do is exactly why I wrote that silly little program in the first place. I just tried it and it worked as advertised.

Jere

[Jere_Jones]

I'll try that in my postprocessing.bat, thanks.
Another issue...I cannot get SA to run on two recordings that end at the same time. It only runs on one or the other, and there seems to be no distinct way it determines which one it picks. It doesn't seem to be alphabetic, it's not based on which recording was started first...I just don't know.
I have the horsepower here to run two (or even 3 or 4) instances of SA at the same time...is that an option?

This isn't SA's fault. It will run on as many files as it is told to run on.

Is there something different about SA's .txt file, and the old(er) versions of comskip's .txt file? Comclean always worked on comskip's output, and cut exactly at the same points as the .wme generated.
SA's output .txt file contains the same cutpoints as the .wme, but comclean doesn't cut anything properly...I'm not convinced this is a comclean issue, because I've tried multiple versions, all with the same results.

I think the difference may be that comskip (almost) never marks the begining of a recording as a commercial. SA starts with the assumption that the first frame is a commercial so often will mark it as such.

OK, something very strange just happened.
My two recordings finished.
SA didn't run at all.
Comclean errored out (as usual), because it couldn't find the .txt that SA didn't generate.
WMP opened up, and started playing the recording. I closed it, and it opened again, and started playing the second recording, then as soon as I closed WMP, renamerecordings worked.
WTF?

See my previous post for a possible solution.

Jere

[reboot]

OK, so I use comskip proxy to call SA, instead of having the showanalyzer line in postprocessing.bat...correct?

[Jere_Jones]

reboot

As an interim solution maybe fire at separate batch with comclean and renamerecordings off the scheduler? The results wouldn't be available for a while but they would be done at some point.

Another way MIGHT be to create a test.bat of zero length. Then compare the test file to the target file using "FC" and then test the errorlevel depending on the result of the compare. If the target file is zero and the test file is zero just loop around (or delay it) and test it again. When the target file is larger than 0 go ahead with the rest of the batch. I have not tried this but it might work.

If you're going to do this, make sure you turn off the live detection. Otherwise the .txt doesn't stay 0 byte for long.

Jere

[reboot]

If comskip proxy runs SA after a recording finishes, will it run on ALL recordings that finish at the same time?
Is there a way to make it run on all recordings? (I often have 2 or 3 that end at the same time).

You're correct about comskip rarely marking the first frame as commercial, but when it does, comclean error's on the first cut, ignoring it, then proceeding with the rest of the cuts.

So, using comskip proxy, my postprocessing.bat should look like this:

Code:

comskip %1 > comskip.log
call comclean %1 >>comclean.log 2>>comclean.err
RenameRecordings %1 > renamerecordings.log

[Jere_Jones]

If comskip proxy runs SA after a recording finishes, will it run on ALL recordings that finish at the same time?
Is there a way to make it run on all recordings? (I often have 2 or 3 that end at the same time).

This is a GB-PVR issue. If it runs the postprocessor.bat on every file, then SA should be run on every file.

Jere

[reboot]

I figured it should, but maybe if Sub drops into this thread he could clear that up for me?

[Jere_Jones]

I figured it should, but maybe if Sub drops into this thread he could clear that up for me?

Ah. I thought you were asking me. Ok, I'll crawl back into my hole now.

Jere

[sub]

Any post processessing, whether running comskip or PostProcessing.bat, is serialized. If two shows finish at the same time, then one is processed first, and when that completes the second is processed.

[jsteele]

reboot
----------------
Here's a way that will probably work. Apparently when SA is finished it places a line of text "FILE PROCESSING COMPLETE" at the top of the file so we can test for the presence of this text using "Find.exe".

Make the postprocesing.bat like this (there may be other things before this like RecordingsManager or something:

....
ShowAnalyzer %1

:test_file
find "FILE PROCESSING COMPLETE" %1
goto result%ERRORLEVEL%
exit

:result1
rem if the line is NOT in the file it will do this stuff
rem timeout.exe is part of the XP Resource Kit - free as I recall
rem you can set NNNN to the number of seconds to wait for SA to finish
rem once it times out it will go back and test the file again

timeout.exe NNNN

goto test_file

:result0
rem if the line is in the file then it will do the rest of your stuff

renamerecordings %1
rectracker %1
------------

I have not tried this but it should work. "Timeout.exe" is part of the XP Resource Kit and simply allows you to put the command processor to sleep for a while. In this case that timeout should be an approximation of the time it takes SA to run. You are probably better using a longer time as once it misses it's going to take the same amount of time on the next cycle too. So, if you set the timeout to 30 minutes and you miss by 10 seconds it will wait another 30 minutes.