Comskip tuning made easy

[erik]

In order to simplify the job for those that want to tune Comskip i have made some advanced data inspection functions available.
The attached picture shows the Comskip debugwindow
The top part of the window is the timeline of the recording.
Clicking on the timeline will move the preview quickly to the selected position
The text at the left is the help text listing the available command keys
The black and white image in the back is the preview of the mpeg recording at the selected position
The coloured graphs show detailed information about the recording.
From the bottom to the top it shows brightness, sound, non_uniformity, scene change, logo match, aspect ratio and black bar positions.
Through zooming and unzooming of the timeline you can have both a good overview and see on a per frame basis the transitions. The selected position is the transition between two commercials showing that both brightness, sound and non_uniformity are within the blackframe limits (graph color changes to white) and that the aspect ratio does not change.

I hope this helps in understanding why Comskip is (not) able to do its job.

[groover km]

Erik, just want to say I really appreciate all the work you put into comskip.

What is it that affects the performance of the comskip.ini file? Is it something to do with the user's hardware setup, or is it more dependent on the signal quality / format / carrier of the incoming signal? What I'm wondering is, if I tweaked my ini file so that it was hitting all the right spots for charter cable here in NC, could that be used by anyone else on charter and / or in NC?

See where I'm going with this? I know you tried to solicit people's input on your forum before, but if users were to upload their ini files, saying where and what they are for (maybe on the wiki?) could we build up a repository for files to try?

Does this makes sense or am I way off the mark?

[erik]

Yes, it does make sense.
The majority of the ini file is independend of the hardwar, only some values can depend on the hardware being used but actually I never saw these to be different so sharing ini files should be easy.
Reboot has shared a well tuned ini file for some of the USA main channels and they have been succesfully used by others.

There is one but.
Some people like previews and leadins, others hate them.
Some people use a lot of padding, some don't
So there will always be a personal aspect in the tuning.
That's why Comskip has so many tunable parameters

[groover km]

Reboot has shared a well tuned ini file for some of the USA main channels and they have been succesfully used by others.

Yeh, my fault - I just checked your forum and saw that. Ooops :o

Didn't realise you could define parameters for individual channels though - I'll have to try that. Typically, the only problem I have is where comskip will identify a passage in a movie by mistake; not a biggie, as I just skip back or (if a movie with no breaks) delete the comskip-generated files.

Thanks again.

[erik]

I welcome .csv files of recodings comskip was not able to correctly determine.
Especially where comskip assumed there was a commercial and there was not.
Mail me your comskip.ini, the .csv file and the corrected .txt file and you help me to improve comskip.

[reboot]

The ini I posted, works for me, on every standard US and Canadian channel, as well as some of the "feature" channels. Untested on the "premium" channels though.
Exceptions are:
CBS
SpikeTV
News stations with scrolling banners.
Stations with junk all over the screen in all 4 corners (temperature, humidity, time, etc.).
I don't ever record anything on news and info stations, and have separate ini's for spike and cbs.

[groover km]

Hi Reboot, I applied your ini file last night and I'm going to see how it goes as I don't record any of the news and info channels either.

Maybe I'm being thick, but I downloaded comskip again last night in order to rtfm. I couldn't see anything regarding setting up individual channels though; can someone point me in the right direction?

All I really want to do is set it up so comskip doesn't run on any of the premium movie channels (that don't have commercials)

Thanks!

[erik]

Its actually nothing inside comskip but a script trick

Inside the comskip zip distribution file is an example postprocessing.bat file that demonstrates how to use channel specific ini file.

You also can use the same trick in paralellprocessing.bat.

Reboot: one ini file for how many channels?

[groover km]

Inside the comskip zip distribution file is an example postprocessing.bat file that demonstrates how to use channel specific ini file.

<slaps head> Of course, that was the ONE file that I didn't open to look at!

Thanks Erik!

[Koenie]

Erik, I remain amazed by the almost 100% perfection of comskip.

I only had one problem where RTL4 starts CSI systematically much later than programmed. The show before is in 16:9 which makes comskip pick the wrong place for the logo. Still no scenes were marked as ads but the ads were detected incomplete.

Symply cutting out part of the show and have comskip write the correct logo, putting this logo in the GBPVR directory and calling it trough the parallelprocessing.bat (comskip --logo=csi.txt %1) file for RTL4 shows makes the detection accurate to the last frame.