Commercial Detection Problems

Channels DVR Server
#1

One of my local stations loves to run a crawl along the bottom of the screen for Coronavirus updates and/or a crawl along the top of the screen for weather alerts during the 7:00PM-8:00PM time slot. This often messes up Channel's commercial detection.

Is there a way for me to submit a sample recording that will help you to fine-tune the commercial detection algorithm to not be fooled by this scenario?

Other than this particular issue, commercial detection and automatic skipping has worked great for me.

#2

AFAIK comskip uses the logo. If the stations logo stays on the screen during breaks it will fool it.
In addition to logo it looks for black screen, checks closed captions and also checks for audio change (like going from 5.1 to 2.0).

#3

The channel logo is still there. They've just inserted a crawl bar at the bottom of the screen and "squished" the picture to fit the available space above, so the logo is in a different absolute location that it normally would be.

That's why I asked about uploading a sample recording to see if the devs could learn anything from it and modify their channel detection algorithm.

#4

The commercial detection is done via an open source program called comskip. I believe the devs have control over its configuration options when used by Channels, so they do have some control over it. However, major overhauls would have to be done by the developers of comskip.

https://www.comskip.org/

#5

Aha. That's good to know. I hadn't realized that.

#6

Since Channels is including the donators version of this 3rd party app, you could modify your comskip.ini included with Channels DVR to make it do what you want.

I'm sure after you visit the comskip support forum you'll appreciate what you're getting with Channels and understand why it's not so easy to do what you're asking :grin:

Just one of my challenges with comskip getting fooled here Commercial Detection Experiences

#7

Maybe you could post a picture or screen shot of what you're talking about.

I get news tickers/crawls and weather tickers/crawls on some of my recordings, especially lateley with C19. I usually just watch these recordings (news broadcasts) at 2x speed and don't have them comskip'd so it doesn't bother me.

Is it happening with other (non-news) programming for you?
Only certain networks/channels?

I can't offer much help for comskip tuning as I only comskip process things I'll archive and then use VideoRedo to cut the comms before saving them.

#8

The only consistently reliable commercial detection I've found is on Tivo. They have people watching the show and flagging the commercials. :grin: I've always wondered if you could train an AI to do that.