COMSKIP media player?

[jrockow]

This may not be the correct forum to ask for help with COMSKIP, but I have tried several others and am getting nowhere.

I use NPVR exclusively as my backend recording service, but have developed a custom UI for managing and viewing my recordings. This was done primarily to accommodate my 83 year-old wife.

My problem is I can't take advantage of using COMSKIP.

My UI uses VLC as the media player, and I don't think it supports the COMSKIP EDL file. I have since discovered that MPV doesn't support it either. MPLAYER looks like it would work, except it doesn't play well with TS files; the timeline is screwed up from the start. I looked at ZOOMPLAYER but didn't get anywhere. If there were a way to just use the NPVR player that would be the solution, but I doubt that's possible either.

Bottom line, is anyone aware of an external Windows media player that supports the COMSKIP EDL?

[bgowland]

MPLAYER looks like it would work, except it doesn't play well with TS files; the timeline is screwed up from the start.

Based on that, my approach would be to transcode / remux to a format which MPLAYER is okay with and then take things from there.

Cheers,
Brian

[BrettB]

MPLAYER looks like it would work, except it doesn't play well with TS files; the timeline is screwed up from the start.

Based on that, my approach would be to transcode / remux to a format which MPLAYER is okay with and then take things from there.

Yeah, that was my thought, too. If the only problem is timeline, then a remux might work well and be pretty light weight to run on the server right after the recording was completed.

I used MPlayer a long time ago to play files (using the .edl skip points) which I downloaded offline to my laptop to watch on planes. I'm pretty sure that I was just taking the raw/original .ts file. But, the contents of .ts files can vary so I wouldn't be surprised if some worked (better than others) and some didn't...

[jrockow]

Thanx guys for your quick response!
I was afraid the transcode/remux was going to be the solution.
I'm running a mini-PC as my server/client and just hope it will keep up.

[BrettB]

Thanx guys for your quick response!
I was afraid the transcode/remux was going to be the solution.
I'm running a mini-PC as my server/client and just hope it will keep up.

As long as a remux (where the video and audio streams are simply copied and NOT decoded/re-encoded) is used, it should not tax the server very much. For what it's worth, here's the section of my postprocessing.bat file where I used to generate remuxed .mp4 files for the Roku client:

Code:

REM "C:\Program Files\NextPVR\Other\ffmpeg.exe" -hide_banner -loglevel error -nostats -i %1 -vcodec copy -acodec aac -ac 2 -c:s copy -f matroska -| "C:\Program Files\NextPVR\Other\ffmpeg.exe" -hide_banner -loglevel error -nostats -i pipe: -codec copy -movflags faststart -y "%~dpn1.mp4"

You might use it as a starting point to test out the server load and MPlayer compatiblity with remuxing.

I also recall having a utility (called Retime?) that could just regenerate the timing for a .ts file which might work for you. But, since you are wanting to always play the files with a 3rd party player via a command line, I'm thinking the remux would probably be your best bet.

[bgowland]

Thanx guys for your quick response!
I was afraid the transcode/remux was going to be the solution.
I'm running a mini-PC as my server/client and just hope it will keep up.

A transport stream is basically a wrapper for any number of AV streams and the ,ts files created by nextpvr should only contain the AV for the show you recorded but with the extra TS baggage which upsets some players.

As BrettB points out a remux (rather than transcode) is pretty much just a copy operation. I definitely think it's worth a try - remux then run comskip and see what MPLAYER can do.

Cheers,
Brian

[jrockow]

Thanx guys for your quick response!
I was afraid the transcode/remux was going to be the solution.
I'm running a mini-PC as my server/client and just hope it will keep up.

As long as a remux (where the video and audio streams are simply copied and NOT decoded/re-encoded) is used, it should not tax the server very much. For what it's worth, here's the section of my postprocessing.bat file where I used to generate remuxed .mp4 files for the Roku client:

Code:

REM "C:\Program Files\NextPVR\Other\ffmpeg.exe" -hide_banner -loglevel error -nostats -i %1 -vcodec copy -acodec aac -ac 2 -c:s copy -f matroska -| "C:\Program Files\NextPVR\Other\ffmpeg.exe" -hide_banner -loglevel error -nostats -i pipe: -codec copy -movflags faststart -y "%~dpn1.mp4"

You might use it as a starting point to test out the server load and MPlayer compatiblity with remuxing.

I also recall having a utility (called Retime?) that could just regenerate the timing for a .ts file which might work for you. But, since you are wanting to always play the files with a 3rd party player via a command line, I'm thinking the remux would probably be your best bet.

BrettB

Thanx for your sample code. Unless I'm missing something (wouldn't surprise me) couldn't I simply use the following to convert TS to MP4?
"ffmpeg -i input.ts -c copy output.mp4"

Something else I hadn't considered was the fact the file would still be in the DB with a TS extension.
Not sure how I'll need to handle that?

[BrettB]

Thanx for your sample code. Unless I'm missing something (wouldn't surprise me) couldn't I simply use the following to convert TS to MP4?
"ffmpeg -i input.ts -c copy output.mp4"

Something else I hadn't considered was the fact the file would still be in the DB with a TS extension.
Not sure how I'll need to handle that?

I'm not an expert on ffmpeg. And I think that the options there came from a few different posts, etc.

If I recall correctly, the "-hide_banner -loglevel error -nostats" part is important to keep it from spamming the nrecord.log file.

And the "-c copy" part is to copy the subtitles. I'm not sure if they would be copied automatically with your "-c copy" parameters.

If you keep both the .ts and .mp4 files, then you are probably correct that there would be an issue. I think that Martin had specifically set the Roku client to try to use a .mp4 extension file even if the database listed the .ts one. By default, I think that NextPVR will always try a .mp4 file extension if the listed .ts file is not found. So, simply deleting (or renaming) the original .ts file would probably work. Or you could use nscripthelper to in your postprocessing.bat file to point the database to the converted file.

[sharkbite]

This may not be the correct forum to ask for help with COMSKIP, but I have tried several others and am getting nowhere.

I use NPVR exclusively as my backend recording service, but have developed a custom UI for managing and viewing my recordings. This was done primarily to accommodate my 83 year-old wife.

My problem is I can't take advantage of using COMSKIP.

My UI uses VLC as the media player, and I don't think it supports the COMSKIP EDL file. I have since discovered that MPV doesn't support it either. MPLAYER looks like it would work, except it doesn't play well with TS files; the timeline is screwed up from the start. I looked at ZOOMPLAYER but didn't get anywhere. If there were a way to just use the NPVR player that would be the solution, but I doubt that's possible either.

Bottom line, is anyone aware of an external Windows media player that supports the COMSKIP EDL?

Have you considered something like "lossless cut" to permanently remove commercials based on the EDL file?
its a bit tedious, but is pretty quick.....and while you are demuxing you might as well....

[jrockow]

Hello there guys. 

Just came in drop by my own version of Comchap but it's for windows. It's called comchapter and comcutter. They are easy batch scripts that ultizes the ffmeta and ffsplit files that comskip outputs and you can use it to add chapters (ffmeta) or to cut out commercials completely (ffsplit). 

I'll leave them here
My githubs
https://github.com/Yankees4life/comcutter
https://github.com/Yankees4life/comchapter

The setup is easy. Just clone the repo or download the zip and extract it somewhere and just call it up like normal (whether for ParallelProcessing or Postprocessing)

For example

Code:

cd c:/comcutter
comcutter.bat %1

Thanx to all that replied to my post.
I came across this post in my search and it seems to give me exactly what I wanted.
All I needed to do was change one line of code to remux to TS instead of MP4.
A big thank-you to "Jean0987654321" for his post.