Commercial Detection Experiences

Same here

I too have thought that the ratings logo in the top left might be useful for detecting when the show returns.

Running v2019.02.12.0028 on a Synology DS218+. Watching Last Man Standing, last night: The commercial detection caught them all--even the short resumption at the end of the show. But it was chopping the breaks just a little >< too short. So then it was either wait for the remainder of the break, or hit "->", which would then necessitate hitting "<-" once or twice.

I'm have a lot of what others have written.... CBS usually does pretty well, ABC, not so much. My local news is spot-on, and PBS usually misses the first 4-5 minutes. The ends of some NBC shows get lost.... I now look at the timeline/comskip key on the program when I first start watching, to see if it thinks the last 5-10 minutes of a show is one big commercial, and then I know I need to manually step forward rather than comskip as I get closer to the end.

Experimented briefly with commercial detection when I first installed Channels DVR, but turned it off after realizing it was inaccurate and didn't want to load down my NAS CPU by using commercial detect for every recording.

If I could select individual passes or episodes to detect I would try it again. I don't like that it's an all or nothing selection and when turned on you are opted in and have to individually disable detection instead of selectively enabling it.

I did the EDL hack and had it generate a VideoReDo project file and used VideoReDo to open the recording and check where the skip marks were.

Curious what the "Edit Commercials" dropdown for an episode does in the version 2019.02.12.0028 I'm running. Nothing but a spinning circle for me, but I have Enable Commercial Detection unchecked right now.

7 posts were split to a new topic: VideoReDo

Wheel Of Fortune and Jeopardy no commercials are detected. Both are on CBS and are on back to back. The Price is Right is also on CBS and commercial detection is perfect.

The other nine shows I record on Fox, CBS, ABC and NBC are about 95% accurate.

For me it works very well most of the time when I wait to watch the recording until after the recording has ended and comskip processing has finished. But it fails 100% of the time if the recording is still in progress :wink::wink::laughing::laughing: Yes that statement is made with tongue firmly in cheek :grin:

Seriously though, the best improvement would be near-real-time detection. Are you still planning on doing something like this (thought I read somewhere this was on the to-do list)?

Last night watching 20/20 on ABC, commercial detection wasn't very accurate. I noticed that the channel logo was not present sometimes until a minute or two after the program resumed after commercial.

One thing that I noticed, when using the commercial jump, it would put me a minute or so into the program and then I'd have to rewind to get back to the start of the segment and more than a few times it would jump all the way back to where the commercial break started as if doing a reverse commercial jump. Maybe I hit the backwards button too quickly, but one would think commercial jump should not work in reverse. Right?

Most of my experience with Channels commercial detection is very positive. However, I record and watch NBC Nightly News daily, and have noticed that entire blocks of the show are often completely missed, buried within what is flagged as commercial segments. It happens at least once a week, and it is usually toward the end of the show.

Just experienced a CBS house ad for Survivor was thought to be non-commercial video. I noticed the CBS logo in the ad. It only appeared for a small portion of the ad.

I did the update. It's WAY better. Very usable.

Last night the Late Show with Seth meyers did a fake movie piece and the whole thing was detected as a commercial. The screen went letterboxed, but the logo was present.

Running 2019.02.12.0028 for the last ten days.

Some commercial detection behaviour is improved over the version we used to run, but, overall I'd say it's mostly worse than before. All sorts of instances of it utterly failing to detect commercial breaks at all. Sometimes detecting program material in the middle of a commercial break. Frequent returns well before commercial breaks end--sometimes by a minute or more.

Do not like. Can I get the old version of Channels DVR back?

Commercial skipping works well for us, but I would still like ChannelsDVR to be able to do this while recording, rather than waiting until recording is complete: Request: com skip while recording

Running Channels DVR v2019.02.12.0028 on a Synology DS1513+ NAS with a 4 core Intel Atom D2701 @ 2.13GHz, 4GB ram.

HDHR Prime on Comcast cable

Using the default comskip.ini it took too long to process recordings. 1-2 hrs for a 1 hour recording, although only 25% CPU load.

I modified the comskip.ini to use two threads [thread_count=2] instead of one and performance is acceptable now with 50% CPU load.

I also added the VideoRedo Project file output [output_videoredo3=1] so I can bring up the recording in VideoRedo TVSuite v5 to see where the scene markers and chapter skip points are set.

Initial observation is it's pretty close, but usually misses at least one commercial segment and/or includes show segments in the commercial blocks.

I'll continue testing it, but most of my recording are cable programs since I use TiVo for my OTA channels.

So the channels I would test it on are;
Animal Planet
BBC America
Discovery
History
MyNetworkTV
National Geographic
NatGeo WILD
Outdoor
PBS
Science
Universal Kids
Weather Channel

I realized when a new Channels DVR version comes out (beta or released) I may have to modify my override comskip.ini file in the data directory to include any changes in the release. I found if I put an override comskip.ini in the data directory that Channels DVR does not copy the default.ini to the Logs/comkip directory anymore. So the only way I know to see what's in the new default comskip.ini is to rename my override comskip.ini to comskip.bak and process a recording to get Channels DVR to copy it's default comskip.ini to the Logs/comskip folder.

Is there an easier way to view the default comskip.ini to see what changed in releases?

OK, so one of the things I'm curious about are two parameters that have been added to the lastest beta. comskip.ini

min_show_segment_length=222
;Any block larger then this in seconds is regarded as a show block

min_commercialbreak=45
;The minimum duration in seconds of any commercial break, that is a sequence of blocks regarded as commercial

So far the commercials that comskip has missed are stand-alone commercial segments from 25-43 secs long.
Does min_commercialbreak=45 mean it won't consider commercial segments shorter than 45 secs?
If so, that's why they're being missed.

A standard commercial is 30 seconds. Sometimes there are 15 second ones. But the broadcasters don't sell slots at 25 or 43 seconds.

I don't have any issue with commercial detection. They all work fine and detect quickly. I have been using a custom comskip.ini for years, though... and I don't play on changing this as long as I continue to use the same hardware.

Will be releasing another build tomorrow to fix these regressions.

I want this too.

I plan to add a number of threads setting to make this easier.

Individual commercials are segments. Segments combined together make up a break. Where are you seeing a 25-45s break?

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MyNetworkTV
It's an ad for "Closed Captioning brought to you by insert_sponsor_name"
Usually just one a few minutes before end of the show, but sometimes there will be a couple spread apart

IIRC it was Ocean Mysteries With Jeff Corwin

I see the default min_commercialbreak value is 25 secs, I'm trying 30 now.

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