BETA: Enhanced Commercial Detection

[eric]

@GTFan

How do we add a commercial break when it's not in the web UI editor?

We don’t have a way to do that, but we’ve improved the segmenter in recent builds.

@eric

We've been working on improving this for a while and recently found something that may improve some of these situations (my early spot checks have been positive of some of the instances that were previously not segmented well).

@fancybot

v2026.07.25.0354

• IMPROVED: Commercial detection does a better job of finding where commercial breaks happen

You can try out the latest DVR pre-release and re-detect commercials for recordings you were having trouble with and then edit the commercials again to see if it does any better.

If that doesn’t work, we don’t currently have anything to make it better, but understand this is an issue in some cases.

[GTFan]

That's unfortunate, one of my common problems with sports events is that commercials are not flagged at all. In fact I just got done watching the women's British Open on USA Network and very few commercials were flagged. I'm running a relatively recent pre-release from July 26 so it had some of the improvements, but without a way to easily add in missed segments there's no way for me to help out the detection.

Thanks for responding.

[GTFan]

Here's the summary for the event I just mentioned. The commercial blocks are way too short and at the end of the program almost nonexistent. I don't really understand why this routinely fails with sports because they all have logos that should be detected because they don't appear in commercials.

[eric]

@fancybot

v2026.08.06.0633

• IMPROVED: Enhanced Commercial Detection

The latest DVR pre-release has some improvements to accuracy of Enhanced Commercial Detection.

[eric]

Enhanced model 2026.08.10.2003 has been released and has some nice improvements to accuracy.

[Morris_Altman]

Hi Eric,

When the re-detect of the entire library happens, this takes the CPU of an N100 to near 100% for a very long time making the entire system unresponsive and has cascading effects on other things running on the system. Can you add a one second pause between detecting videos as it works it's way through the library to allow other processes a chance to get some work done? If you have a better idea that's fine.

Thank you,

Morrs

[eric]

@Morris_Altman I’ll see what we can do to make this less of an impact on the system. Are you on Windows or Linux?

[Morris_Altman]

Thank you Eric,

I run Channels DVR on Windows.

[Shaggylive]

I was watching the log this evening as I'm trying to improve my detection times (bumped encoder down to 720p) and noticed something weird

2026/08/11 18:02:00.017568 [SNR] Buffer statistics for "TV\MSNow30 News\MSNow30 News 2026-08-11 2026-08-11-1730.mpg": buf=0%-2% drop=0%
2026/08/11 18:02:00.063880 [DVR] Finished job 1786487400-356 MSNow30 News
2026/08/11 18:02:00.105588 [DVR] Processing file-46155: TV\MSNow30 News\MSNow30 News 2026-08-11 2026-08-11-1730.mpg
2026/08/11 18:02:01.166100 [DVR] Generating fingerprint for file-46155: MSNow30 News 2026-08-11 2026-08-11-1730.mpg
2026/08/11 18:02:01.386512 [DVR] Running commercial detection on file 46155 (TV\MSNow30 News\MSNow30 News 2026-08-11 2026-08-11-1730.mpg)
2026/08/11 18:04:53.944836 [DVR] Generated fingerprint for file-46155 in 2m53s
2026/08/11 18:20:45.361780 [DVR] Commercial detection failed for MSNow30 News 2026-08-11 2026-08-11-1730.mpg: comskip did not detect any commercials

I manually ran Re-detect commercials before I noticed that it still ran enhanced detection. so I checked and I was able to edit commercials.

2026/08/11 18:20:48.990793 [DVR] Completed enhanced commercial detection on file 46155 (TV\MSNow30 News\MSNow30 News 2026-08-11 2026-08-11-1730.mpg) in 4s
2026/08/11 18:21:18.758895 [DVR] Running commercial detection on file 46155 (TV\MSNow30 News\MSNow30 News 2026-08-11 2026-08-11-1730.mpg)
2026/08/11 18:30:00.543177 [DVR] Starting job 1786491000-356 MSNow30 News on ch=[30.356]
2026/08/11 18:30:00.543177 [DVR] Waiting 29m59s until next job 1786492800-356 MSNow30 News
2026/08/11 18:30:00.543177 [DBG] Scheduling wake timer for scheduled recording in 28m29.4568225s
2026/08/11 18:30:00.545940 [TNR] Sharing existing connection to M3U-MSNowCopy for ch30.356 MSNOW30 (clients=2, len=0)
2026/08/11 18:30:00.548534 [DVR] Recording for job 1786491000-356 from M3U-MSNowCopy ch30.356 into "TV\MSNow30 News\MSNow30 News 2026-08-11 2026-08-11-1830.mpg" for 31m59.4568225s
2026/08/11 18:30:01.047387 [IDX] Generating video index for job 1786491000-356
2026/08/11 18:32:00.113922 [SNR] Buffer statistics for "TV\MSNow30 News\MSNow30 News 2026-08-11 2026-08-11-1800.mpg": buf=0% drop=0%
2026/08/11 18:32:00.221341 [DVR] Finished job 1786489200-356 MSNow30 News
2026/08/11 18:32:00.423612 [DVR] Waiting 28m0s until next job 1786492800-356 MSNow30 News
2026/08/11 18:32:00.423612 [DBG] Scheduling wake timer for scheduled recording in 26m29.5763873s
2026/08/11 18:32:00.426750 [DVR] Processing file-46156: TV\MSNow30 News\MSNow30 News 2026-08-11 2026-08-11-1800.mpg
2026/08/11 18:32:02.348325 [DVR] Generating fingerprint for file-46156: MSNow30 News 2026-08-11 2026-08-11-1800.mpg
2026/08/11 18:34:20.443446 [DVR] Commercial detection failed for MSNow30 News 2026-08-11 2026-08-11-1730.mpg: comskip did not detect any commercials
2026/08/11 18:34:20.453772 [DVR] Running commercial detection on file 46156 (TV\MSNow30 News\MSNow30 News 2026-08-11 2026-08-11-1800.mpg)
2026/08/11 18:34:21.672716 [DVR] Generated fingerprint for file-46156 in 2m19s
2026/08/11 18:44:55.326812 [DVR] Commercial detection for MSNow30 News 2026-08-11 2026-08-11-1800.mpg finished with 4 markers in 10m35s (3 threads).
2026/08/11 18:45:01.360323 [DVR] Completed enhanced commercial detection on file 46156 (TV\MSNow30 News\MSNow30 News 2026-08-11 2026-08-11-1800.mpg) in 6s
2026/08/11 18:45:36.202953 [DVR] Completed enhanced commercial detection on file 46156 (TV\MSNow30 News\MSNow30 News 2026-08-11 2026-08-11-1800.mpg) in 3s

not sure why detection reported failed for that recording

also recordings from this source run enhanced detection twice.. I'm assuming it must have something to do with my custom source loop w/ placeholders. would there be a better way to accomplish custom placeholders?

#EXTINF:-1 channel-id="30.356" channel-number="30.356" tvg-name="MSNow30" tvc-guide-description="MSNow News" tvc-guide-placeholders="1800" tvc-guide-placeholders-grouping="title" tvc-guide-title="MSNow30 News" tvc-guide-tags="MSNow, News",MSNOW30
http://localhost:8089/devices/ANY/channels/356/stream.mpg?format=ts

Logs have been submitted as 0c1a1398-bfa2-4ce2-a3a3-5c250292729a

[eric]

@Morris_Altman Could you submit diagnostics?

[Morris_Altman]

Logs have been submitted as 9096f50f-ea55-490b-ab6d-eaecd9d70a6e

Thank you. You can ignore the firewall warning as I created the hole manualy after accidently deleting it.

[eric]

Thanks for bringing this to my attention. I realized that we didn't have as many limitations on the utilization of the Enhanced Detection as we should have.

@fancybot

v2026.08.12.2010

• IMPROVED: Enhanced Commercial Detection now respects the Thread Count on Windows and macOS where it previously used all CPU cores (Linux does not have this problem)
• IMPROVED: Enhanced Commercial Detection now only backfills detection after update when the DVR is idle

It now should use a lot less resources and also back off if anything else is going on.

[Morris_Altman]

Great, I've updated.

Thank you Eric,

Morris