Commercial detection failed exit status 1

Channels DVR Server Troubleshooting
#1

For the past couple of days im having trouble with comskip. This seems to be happening on OTA recordings as well as TVE recordings.

Heres a snippet from the server log. I also have similar errors from an OTA channel (local news) which i have never seen an error with comskip on that program for many many months. No changes to the broadcast that i can see when i look at the recording.

2021/12/17 08:01:00.676340 [DVR] Finished job 1639747740-ch6166 Tom Curran's Patriots Talk Podcast
2021/12/17 08:01:00.722202 [DVR] Processing file-1746: TV/Tom Curran's Patriots Talk Podcast/Tom Curran's Patriots Talk Podcast 2020-09-11 2021-12-17-0729.mpg
2021/12/17 08:01:00.731390 [DVR] Waiting 8h27m59.268651s until next job 1639780140-43 5 Eyewitness News at 4:30 pm
2021/12/17 08:01:02.151852 [DVR] Running commercial detection on file 1746 (TV/Tom Curran's Patriots Talk Podcast/Tom Curran's Patriots Talk Podcast 2020-09-11 2021-12-17-0729.mpg)
2021/12/17 08:01:12.494488 [NAT] Successfully mapped port 8089 using upnp
2021/12/17 08:16:46.087932 [DVR] Commercial detection failed for Tom Curran's Patriots Talk Podcast 2020-09-11 2021-12-17-0729.mpg with exit status 1

edit: i also reran the commercial detection on my local news recording manually from the web interface and it failed a second time.

Any help would be greatly appreciated

Thanks

#2

My understanding is it will fail with code 1 if it doesn’t identify any commercial blocks. So the detection process is succeeding, but it wasn’t able to find any commercials. I see this on NBA recordings pretty much 100% of the time. I think the error message is misleading. I wish comskip would improve it, because this confused me at first too. However I believe this error is directly from comskip so not something the Channels Devs can fix.

#3

Just in case case some else runs into this issue:

In my case Comskip was failing on EVERY recording with exit status 1. I had never seen this before, and im not sure what was going on.

Several things happened over the past few days.
1: An automatic Plex update.
2: I installed several pending security updates from apple onto my high sierra machine which is running the channels dvr server.

Im assuming somewhere, somehow, something might have trashed comskip.

I did verify it ran on several programs this morning by watching the mac activity monitor, and as i mentioned above the log file came back with exit status 1.

My fix was to uninstall and reinstall channels, and restore the channels database from backup. I think doing this also reinstalled comskip and any comskip.ini files associated with channels.

@tmm1 @maddox

Can you confirm that reinstalling channels also reinstalls
Comskip and reinitializes it?

Could PLEX have clobbered comskip? I have plex pass but never use the plex dvr, but doesnt it use comskip as well?

Just trying to understand what might have been going on so that i can avoid it happening again.

Thanks all

#4

Unlikely that anything could affect or trash Channels' comskip.

The best way to figure out why comskip is failing would be by looking at the comskip log file in Logs/xxx/