BETA: Enhanced Commercial Detection

Channels DVR Server
#81

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?

#82

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.

#83

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.

#84

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.

#85

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.

1 Like
#86

Dose enhanced commercial detection use community edits or must we edit commercial breaks ourselves to see the improvements?

#87

@Morris_Altman It uses community edits, but not everyone records the same shows, so if there are certain shows or networks that you watch things on where it gets things wrong, editing them (and sharing them) will likely improve your own experience over time.

#88

A new model has been released as 2026.03.12.1811. You can update to it by clicking the Check For Updates button on Enhanced Detection.

#89
#90

Just saw your message, @eric, about the available upgrade. I went to the settings page just now to upgrade and my server is already using it.

1000025466
1000025466902×303 42.9 KB

The last time I did any type of upgrade on the server was before 2026.03.12:

1000025463
10000254631080×738 86 KB

I know for sure I didn't upgrade the enhanced commercial detection so I'm wondering how it got upgraded by itself. :thinking:

#91

Mine did the same, upgraded by itself.

I just saw this in the log:

2026/03/14 18:18:57.747284 [INFO] Enhanced comskip model updated to 2026.03.12.1811

1 Like
#92

After the most recent update (Version 2026.03.12.1811), my DVR server abruptly shut down/ crash while watching live TV. Logs have been submitted as 364c2b41-a041-4073-9cf3-e57a38fa7b2c

According to the logs at the time of the shutdown, the DVR was busy running enhanced commercial detection. This excerpt from the logs covers the time of the crash and my manual restart of the program:

2026/03/15 08:26:00.635977 [DVR] Completed enhanced commercial detection on file 10191 (Movies/Roll on Texas Moon (1946) 2024-02-08-0244.mpg) in 4s
2026/03/15 08:26:03.831166 [DVR] Completed enhanced commercial detection on file 10172 (TV/Everybody Loves Raymond/Everybody Loves Raymond S09E01 2004-09-20 The Home 2024-02-07-1529.mpg) in 3s
2026/03/15 08:26:06.663517 [DVR] Completed enhanced commercial detection on file 10170 (TV/Everybody Loves Raymond/Everybody Loves Raymond S08E23 2004-05-24 Golf for It 2024-02-07-1459.mpg) in 3s
2026/03/15 08:26:09.812471 [DVR] Completed enhanced commercial detection on file 10168 (TV/Everybody Loves Raymond/Everybody Loves Raymond S08E22 2004-05-17 The Mentor 2024-02-07-1429.mpg) in 3s
2026/03/15 08:26:13.122874 [DVR] Completed enhanced commercial detection on file 10166 (TV/Everybody Loves Raymond/Everybody Loves Raymond S08E21 2004-05-10 The Model 2024-02-07-1359.mpg) in 3s
2026/03/15 08:26:16.104309 [DVR] Completed enhanced commercial detection on file 10164 (TV/Everybody Loves Raymond/Everybody Loves Raymond S08E20 2004-05-03 Blabbermouths 2024-02-07-1329.mpg) in 3s
panic: interface conversion: *gorgonia.I32 is not tensor.Tensor: missing method Apply

goroutine 344461229 [running]:
gorgonia.org/gorgonia.transposeOp.Do({{0xc00fae2d40, 0x4, 0x4}, 0x4}, {0xc00650ecc0, 0x1, 0xc005aafc01?})
	gorgonia.org/[email protected]/op_tensor.go:952 +0x152
gorgonia.org/gorgonia.(*execOp).exec(0xc005aafc70, 0xc0057fa500)
	gorgonia.org/[email protected]/vm_tape_nocuda.go:66 +0x13c3
gorgonia.org/gorgonia.(*tapeMachine).runall(0xc0057fa500, 0xc003ac24d0, 0xc003ac25b0)
	gorgonia.org/[email protected]/vm_tape.go:262 +0x1c3
created by gorgonia.org/gorgonia.(*tapeMachine).RunAll in goroutine 731
	gorgonia.org/[email protected]/vm_tape.go:223 +0x133
2026/03/15 08:28:28.676285 [SYS] Starting Channels DVR v2026.03.12.2252 (linux-x86_64 pid:17216) in /var/packages/ChannelsDVR/target/channels-dvr/data
2026/03/15 08:28:31.009291 [SYS] Started HTTP Server on 8089
2026/03/15 08:28:32.145444 [M3U] Refreshed lineup for ADBTuner-DirecTV with 238 channels
#93

@jsfullam Thanks for the report. Looking into it.

#94

Thnk you, @eric ,
If this info is helpful, I am running Channels DVR server software as a native installation (non-docker) on a Synology NAS DS 920+

#95

The latest pre-release has the fix for this crash.

1 Like
#96

Thank you, @eric !

#97

I was also automatically updated to 2026.03.12.1811 here. I would prefer to wait until the more adventurous test at least 24 hours. I installed the 2026.03.15.2326 pre-release to avoid a possible crash.

#98

To be clear, the model had nothing to do with the crash.

The model is only updated if it is shown to improve the accuracy of commercial detection and is automatically updated (if available) when the DVR is restarted, but it is never checked again while the DVR is running, which is why the there is a button to update.

2 Likes
#99

The 3 preview images in the commercial edit window, are those supposed to show beginning, middle, end of the segment? After confirming show blocks recently, I was surprised there was about 1m of commercials at the start of a block. I had no way of knowing because I didn't see the commercial frame, but could not have done a thing since it was detected with the show block.

Not sure what the recent update changed, but I did notice the last show I confirmed commercials had WAY more blocks to edit, which is good for granularity. It was way worse in detecting show and commercial though, on a show that has previously done pretty well.

#100

Correct.

Yes, this is a known issue with the segmenting that we use from the comskip scene detection. As discussed above, fixing this is not part of the current set of improvements.

Nothing changed in a recent update related to scene detection/segment splitting. It may be that there were things about this recording that just caused the segmenting to act differently. If you are sharing your commercial edits with us, that will feed into future improvements.