It's possible, but we also have a lot of HDHomeRun recordings and I assume many would be from Discovery, so that would be covered. One of the biggest differences/downsides from HDMI-capture-based solutions is that they do not capture Closed Captions, which could be impact the quality.
I'll see if I can roll out a new model in the coming week.
With the new Enhanced Detection, is there a post processing way to cut the commercials and compress the resulting file to an MKV? Like there's an EDL that can be exported and processed elsewhere?
Since I keep most recordings as library, I've been using MCEbuddy for my cuts and also compress the file to save space.
Settings - Advanced - Integrations Advanced settings for other video software
Thanks. I figured that out. Wasn't sure if the EDL would contain the enhanced detection markers, and it seems it does. I'm going to have to rethink my workflow, but this new editor is going to save me tons of time.
Hi, I frequently have issues with commercial detection of ABC World News. The program does not follow a standard timing. Channels DVR frequently misses commercials, or cuts out too much. I have opted in to the enhanced detection and started submitting edits for the last few days. The issue I'm having is that the sections it allows me to mark are not granular enough. One section could contain both the program and commercials. How can I split it up more in order to provide accurate edits?
An update to Enhanced Commercial Detection has been released as 2026.03.06.1408. You can press "Check For Update" under Enhanced Commercial Detection to install it.
It's working even better now, and I've set the default to Enhanced. I am however skewing the success stats a bit by ignoring the part of Guidance for Commercial Editing about not including end credits and "on next week" segments. Sometimes I want to see the names of minor guest actors, and I always want to watch the next episode previews
I would like to echo sdschramm's comments about the granularity of the blocks available to select in Re-Edit Commercials. Tonight I watched Monday's episode of American Idol using the beta version of the iPad app on a Mac mini while doing other things on the Mac. Many of the commercial cuts included about 30 seconds of ads before getting to the cut, so I would go over to Re-Edit Commercials to make an edit, but in all cases, the ad portion was grouped in with the main program and I was not able to make an edit to report. There was a single edit that I was able to report when a few seconds at the beginning of the program were missed.
It's interesting that sdschramm complained about ABC World News and American Idol is also on ABC. I have not noticed this issue on other networks. I do not record much from ABC, so I will make a few other ABC recordings to see if this is specific to ABC in general. By the way, I am using two HDHR Extend tuners for my captures and my ABC station is KGO in San Francisco.
I did read the link posted above about using LosslessCut get more granularity, but I have not tried using it. It is not clear to me that edits made by LosslessCut and shared would help improve Enhanced Commercial Detection.
It's working well for me on three ABC dramas on KGO, so maybe it's just ABC news and reality shows that it's having problems with. It also does well for me with 60 Minutes and a drama on CBS, but sometimes struggles with a CBS talk show though that is much improved now. Aside from PBS (no commercials), I'm not recording much else now since cancelling cable.
I looked at a recording of Jimmy Kimmel Live! from last night and the cuts were perfect. Toward the end there was a large commercial block with a 23 second preview of guests coming next week in the middle of the commercials, and Enhanced nailed it while standard commercial detection marked the whole thing as being part of the program.
I do have a feature request for the Edit Commercials UI. Would it be possible to freeze the top frame to make it easier to compare Enhanced and Standard edits? It would be nice to scroll down and compare edits without having to continually scroll back up to toggle between Enhanced and Standard. Alternatively, perhaps everything in first frame could scroll off the screen except the Enhanced and Standard buttons.
Another option would be to have a "compare" option that would show what each method identified.
@DavidP Go and edit the commercials to be what you see as accurate, then hit Save. Once you've done that, when you select Enhanced and Standard it'll show you an additional icon next to each segment that tells you what you picked so you can see what is accurate vs what they selected (in green).
We understand this is a problem with the current situation. Right now we've decided to live with the segmenting that comes from comskip, but we understand the limitations and hope to improve it some time in the future.
Thanks. That works. Marking the recording as verified also shows the icons.
However, it would be nice to see the Enhanced icons in the Standard view before making any edits. It seems like making a small edit or marking a recording as verified just to see the icons would result an incorrect edit upload to you. If I start by marking a recording as verified to get the icons, then make edits and save, would that screw up your samples, or will saving edits simply overwrite the previous determination that the recording was verified?
One more question. What does "Automatically generate commercial editor thumbnails" actually do? It seems like the thumbnails are in the Edit Commercials UI even if the box is not checked.
I don't think I quite understand what your intention is. What I was describing is that you would look through the view, make the edits based on what your opinion is of what is correct, and then you would be able to see what the correct view was vs what either of the commercial detection mechanisms is.
I don't think I understand why it is useful to flip between the commercial detection results before you have made your judgement on what is accurate.
It is an optimization that causes the thumbnails to be generated when the recording is completed to speed up the initial load of the Commercial Editor instead of waiting for them to be generated on-demand when you open the editor.
I think the initial motivation was to see how much better Enhanced is to compared to Standard just out of curiosity without needing to toggle back and forth. However, after doing that a few times I got a pretty good sense of the improvement provided by Enhanced.
Enhanced seems to be working so well that I do not bother editing commercials before viewing. However, if I see a commercial cut that was way off, I still go into the commercial editor to identify the segments that should have been included or excluded just to report it to you. It would be interesting if you were able to see how people use FF/REW around the commercial breaks and try to learn from that, but I imagine that would be hard to implement and people might find it a bit too invasive of privacy.
We have ideas for how we can make the commercial break detection better, it's just a larger project and we're trying to focus on understanding the limit of how much we can improve using the existing comskip segmenting before tackling that.
Dose enhanced commercial detection use community edits or must we edit commercial breaks ourselves to see the improvements?
