How am I just discovering this new feature today?! Excited to see how much it improves my experience. Thank you devs!
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Enhanced Comskip model 2026.03.20.1803 has been released.
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Thank you Eric,
Years ago when I chose to move from TiVo to Channels DVR automatic commercial skipping on all content was the deciding factor for me. Back then both the humans doing the commercial skipping for the TiVo and automatic commercial skipping on Channels DVR were both OK yet there was plenty of room for improvement. My recent commercial skipping experience on Channels DVR has been fantastic. I start a showing and put my remote down and don't need to pick it up till it's over. I have not seen a false positive or false negative in a few weeks.
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That's a great anecdote, but I can tell you that it's wildly inconsistent on sports events. I chase watch almost everything to catch up to live and the live detection still replies on comskip which is problematic.
But even on events where they've completed and enhanced detection has run, I don't really see a huge difference in the reliability of the skips. Some events on some channels are great, others are unwatchable with automatic skips.
Live commercial detection has never worked well for me. I'm not aware of anyone that is happy with it. If you are somone that is happy with live commercial detection please chime in.
@GTFan It's true that Sports Events are one of the lowest category of recordings that people have submitted edited commercials for. The more that we get, the better the system will become at being able to handle the unique aspects of them.
Thanks, I'll try to do better to submit those.
My comments would be that
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it's definitely better than the previous pure comskip system
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it's still not perfect
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it would be nice if there were a way to have these as the numbers recorded in the video.ffsplit file rather than the "pure" comskip numbers. I can (and do) edit the video.ffsplit file, but less work is better!
I have found that live commercial detection works extremely well for NFL football games. I start watching the game about 60 minutes after it begins and I end at the same time it does, and rarely ever watch a commercial. It also works very well for the local news and most OTA shows as long as I watch at least 10 minutes behind the live feed. Commercial detection [overall] works poorly for the TVE channels that inject their own holding pattern screens.
That's great to hear
Before the update, commercial skip was all but useless on World News Tonight and my local news. Now, I'd say it's about 90% better. Still not perfect, but close enough to actually use it on those shows now.
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CBS and NBC NFL yes, ESPN and FOX no. Lots of false positive skips on the latter.
No way can I enable autoskip on NFL.
Okay.
Been using comskip for a decade or two now, and I think there was another algorithm somewhere in there ... 'commercial detector' that was used for a while in Sage. I've come to understand that they aren't perfect, but I appreciate Eric's attempt to improve it to be the best it can be, and quite frankly I'm not sure how many other developers (other than Eric) are actually working on this today.
EDIT: I should probably also mention that I may be more forgiving than some users with reagard to commercial detection. If it fails, I still have the ability to fast-forward through commercials, the likes of which can't be done on some platforms any more (where you are forced to watch a commercial to get to the content).
I still don't think it's very good with ABC World News Tonight.
There is always a very short minute segment about three quarters of the way through the broadcast that is always missed because it's in between longer commercial segments.
When I looked at last night's broadcast, it missed even more than that.
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I too have had issues with the commercial skipping with my local news and ABC World News Tonight. I've been submitting corrections the past few weeks, but haven't seen any improvement. Sometimes the issue is with the "edit commercials" interface not allowing edits that are precise enough. (it will group the show and a commercial within the same block with no way to split it).
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@eric Why would these tiny little segments get flagged as show under enhanced commercial detection?
Show: TV/Mighty Cruise Ships/Mighty Cruise Ships S02E03 2017-02-26 Viking Sea 2026-04-07-1100.mpg
The crazy thing is if I select standard they are not selected. I'm finding that with some shows, standard detection is much better than enhanced (usually for non primetime stuff)
Here is another one:
Show: TV/Contraband Seized at the Border/Contraband Seized at the Border S02E07 2023-11-27 Crying Uncle 2026-04-07-1059.mpg
This is enhanced:
This is standard:
I am using the new webvtt stuff so I'm not sure if this a factor....
I submitted diagnostics:
07e8dba0-cfda-44b8-ac31-7495cb668703
@slampman Honestly there isn't a good explanation for "why" when it comes to these things other than "we need more data for this sort of recording".
I'm in the process of training another model with the latest submissions, so once that's released, hopefully it'll do a better job with these situations (and the news situations mentioned above).
We've released a new model 2026.04.07.1758 that can be updated by restarting the DVR or tapping the Check For Update.
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Was verifying commercials on a recent recording, and while the last frame is the last frame of show segment shown in the commercial editor is of the show segment, there's about at least 90 seconds of commercial included after the last frame of show shown.
@TheDaveAbides Yes, as we talked about previously in this thread, the segmentation we are using comes from the comskip project that we have always been using. Improving the segmentation is not something that is part of this initial work, but is something we hope to tackle some time in the distant future.