decrease comskip priority? Problem when watching then comskip starts

[toomanyhandles]

Hi all;

A couple times now, I come in, a show is half recorded, and I start watching the recording before the show is finished. It all works well until the show finishes, comskip starts up.

At that point I lose control of GBPVR (although the video plays just fine still, I just can't pause or manually skip forward in 15 sec. blocks), remote button pushes mostly don't get processed, and even if I try to just watch through at some point it freezes up. lots of HD gronking later, (I wait a long time, I haven't had it recover on its own), I have to rudely reboot (OK, it's onlyl once I had to reboot, the other times it finished fine).

I guess I've always waited long enough for comskip to quit working, not sure why the HD still has activity. Video plays fine, comskip blocks marked, etc.

Is there a way around this? Decrease comskip run priority? A way to set up a flag for comskip to look for, if a show is being played delay processing?

I don't know of a way to turn on/off automatic scanning without changing config which interrupts playback (and the recording which was still going on).

PVR-350, so hardware help with encoding and decoding, 1.7GHz, 1gig RAM.
I don't know how much comskip normally loads the system in terms of %, but since I do VNC in without lag often just after recordings are made and it should be running, it doesn't seem likely it's loading the system to the point of almost complete shutout of other I/O. GBPVR also works fine (buttons respond, other recordings are playable, etc, while comskip is working on the just-finished show in those cases- just not if I'm watching the show).

Thanks!

[stustunz]

what version of comskip are you using
mine seems to be a bit more unstable since i up dated from version 6.something to 7
but i have also done other things aswell but just trying to narrow the problem down and wondering if you have done the same

[toomanyhandles]

I'm using 79.89, which is a couple revisions old- although looking at the site, 79.91 is 20-45% faster which will help this situation anyway, indirectly. I won't have to wait as much. I haven't had instability problems with comskip, but the 79.7somethings didn't do as good a detection on one of my channels for some reason. It's all been good for a while.

I don't think its a problem with comskip, it seems stable enough, it makes sense to me that fighting over the same data, esp. when one program is trying to play a video stream from it, would cause problems.

If I could fix this by dropping the priority of comskip so that gbpvr really wins, in these situations, that would be OK.

Having gbpvr place a flag so that comskip would still process the file as usual, but wait until gbpvr was done playing the file on those rarer occasions would be neat though

[stefan]

There is a flag (or used to be) in comskip's config file. Look for "priority" or "nice"... I think it was one of those names. That said, I think the default priority is "low"...

[HtV]

Have you tried running comskip parallel to the recording. It works very well for me, on my system it takes ~10% cpu. When you run it afterwards it will take all available cpu and it generates a lot of disk traffic.

[toomanyhandles]

Have you tried running comskip parallel to the recording. It works very well for me, on my system it takes ~10% cpu. When you run it afterwards it will take all available cpu and it generates a lot of disk traffic.

No, I never did try the parallel method, the idea scared me

Have you tried watching a show that was recording and the comskip txt file was also being generated in parallel? What happens when you start to catch up due to commercial skipping? For example, you enter a skip block that's not done yet (no end to it?)

I'll go ahead and give the parallel method a try, then.

[stefan]

I never experienced any such problems when I used comskip in parallell processing.

[toomanyhandles]

Ok, I've turned parallel processing on in config. I'll give it a try and not be nervous about it.

I didn't find a "nice" or priority option in config.ini but per the manual there is a "--playnice" command line option that I can have comskip invoked with.

Looking at comskip.ini, there is also a "liveTV y/n" toggle, so that comskip output is or is not available to gbpvr if you are watching at the same time (my interpretation anyway). I guess I'll leave that N for now and skip forward manually when needed, and I'll try enabling that option later.

Thanks for the replies; I'll see how it works out-

[stefan]

I didn't find a "nice" or priority option in config.ini but per the manual there is a "--playnice" command line option that I can have comskip invoked with.

That's what I was thinking about, sorry for misleading you.

[toomanyhandles]

That's what I was thinking about, sorry for misleading you.

Oh, no misleading, it's always good to read the fine print. I only get a chance to mess with the PVR innards about once every 3 months so I forget a lot.