Application to automatically remove commercials and/or transcode

[NiteShdw]

I'm working on a program in Visual Basic 2005 that will be a front end for removing commercials from recordings. The intent of the program is to be including in GBPVR's postprocessing.bat.

I'm planning on implementing the following commercial removing techniques:
1. Cuttermaran
- Use comskip TXT files to generate a Cuttermaran file, and run Cuttermaran automatically.
- Option to replace the original file with the new one

2. Transcode
- Use VirtualDubMod to transcode the video, without commercials, to DivX or XviD
- Configurable encoding options such as video size, 1 or 2 pass, noise reduction

If anyone has any ideas or suggestions, or currently has a good way to remove commercials that they would like to be automated, I would be happy to hear any ideas.

[reboot]

Comskip is still the definitive answer for removing commercials in gbpvr. Show Analyzer also works extremely well, but support for it within gbpvr has dwindled, but it's a great standalone.
I prefer to use videoredo to do the commercial cutting, although cuttermaran should be fine for most.
How about the option to use multiple/different cutting apps?

[NiteShdw]

I have already worked on using "mpgtx.exe" to do the cutting, which actually seems to do a better job than cuttermaran. But yes, I am working on making it possible to use different cutting apps.

As of this moment, my application does work with mpgtx.exe from start to finish, but there is a lot more work to be done.

The goal is to make it easy to use for those that don't want to play around with funky batch files or trying to get the right programs.

[jksmurf]

The goal is to make it easy to use for those that don't want to play around with funky batch files or trying to get the right programs.

Alrighty, now that's a mission statement I can get to grips with.

Comskip works well for me now (thanks to Erik), and drag and drop onto comclean or comclean2 seems to work OK too, but your batch file would be a great automation tool for all that.

All we'd need to make it perfect is to get the EWA folks to add check boxes to allow it to run on recordings of our choice. e.g. "ALL episodes of this series" and "none of those".

k.

[mikaelgu]

Show Analyzer also works extremely well, but support for it within gbpvr has dwindled, but it's a great standalone.

What do you mean by that? I've been using it for quite a while now and I haven't seen any changes in GB's behaviour towards it.

[sub]

Yeah, nothings changed. It should still work fine.

[mikaelgu]

Yeah, nothings changed. It should still work fine.

Thought so. SA's UI has changed so that it no longer displays the extra channel info that GB provides it, but looking at the logs it's still all there. They work great together for me. No complaints on my part.

[reboot]

What I meant was, there are virtually no threads here on SA, but continue to be plenty on Comskip. Now that sub has included comskip as the definitive app directly within gbpvr, it's trending.

Any word on a relase date for this yet?

[NiteShdw]

The problem is that I want it to do too much, so nothing is completely finished!

I am trying to focus on just MPEG2 cutting now, and once that's working completely I'll add Trancoding and other options. If there is enough interest in this, I'll spend more time working on it.

[NiteShdw]

I am ready to release my first public beta of this application (ComCut, but I'm open to more creative titles). It was written in VB.net 2005, and thus it requires .NET Framework 2.0.

Currently, the only thing this really does is:
1. Check for a comskip txt file; create it if it's missing
2. Parse the comskip txt file to find commercials breaks
3. Run "mpgtx.exe" on the MPEG2 file, joining all the show segments
4. Demux and Remux the resulting stream in order to fix any possible errors (this is required for the file to play on some streaming media players)
5. Replace the original MPEG2 file with the new 'clean' version (save the original as a .original file)

To use, place the following at the end of "postprocessing.bat" (include the full path to comcut.exe):
comcut %1

You will need to run comcut.exe without any parameters in order to adjust the settings and set the paths to the required programs.