Server running pre-release 2026.01.06.0212.
Every single time I go to the server, it's always submitting comskip recordings, even when the server is busy recording. Like now:
Is this expected? I thought this was supposed to happen only when the server was idle.
@eric one thing that may skew your stats is that if a show has a final segment of less than 30 seconds, I have to include enough commercials in front of it to total 30 seconds or the system won't skip over all the commercials before that.
@mjitkop I don't see any recent diagnostics from you, so I don't have a way to know what's going on there.
@Pokemon_Dad I'm not sure what you're describing here — we don't have any logic around 30 seconds. And yes, if you aren't properly annotating the start and end of commercials, it will skew our logic. Could you take a screenshot of the commercial editor in one of these situations and post it here so I have a better idea what you're referring to?
Sure, here you go. This is an extreme example, with a final show block of 10.77 seconds. Usually the last show block in many news shows and late night talk shows will be closer to, but just under, 30 seconds.
In this example, if I don't include that 58.81s last commercial block, none of the commercials before that last 10.77 seconds of the show will be skipped. The same thing will happen even if that last show block is 29.9999 seconds. Channels DVR will not skip to any show block that is less than 30 seconds.
Conversely, any commercials shorter than 30 seconds are also not skipped. I've only encountered this with PlayOn downloads, because they sometimes contain one or two commercials that are shorter than 30 seconds. Channels DVR sees the PlayOn indexing of those commercials, but doesn't skip them because they are 29 seconds or less.
Thirty seconds is a longstanding theme with comskip. I've regularly encountered this since installing Channels DVR in 2019.
Fair statement.
I'm in the process of generating the diagnostic logs and it's been doing it for more than 5 minutes now!
Usually, it takes less than a minute. I'll let it go as long as it doesn't spit out any errors.
With "comskip" or with "commercial skipping in Channels".
@mjitkop I've responded to you privately. It looks like your DVR has gotten into a bad state and I'd like to figure out if there's a bug we can uncover here.
This doesn't line up with what I'm seeing in the code (or what I experience). One thing that may be happening is that the app behaves differently for recordings that have had commercials edited/verified vs recordings that haven't. If the recording hasn't been edited/verified, we don't trust the last commercial break being properly detected, so we do not automatically skip the last one. If it has been edited/verified, we trust what is there and skip it.
Additionally, we do not automatically skip detected commercials if the recording has not been edited/verified (because those have often been spurious as well).
Could you edit a recording to be correct, mark the recording as unwatched (this is important to do this for this test), and confirm if the app skips through all commercials properly?
