Commercial skip setup for linux operating system

[evolution2147]

Hello,
Over the weekend I switched my 2012 Mac mini (i5 2.5ghz) from Apple Catalina to Red Hat 8. So far all the clients seem faster and smoother with the linux system. On the apple OS there seemed to be a lot more overhead. I had a lot of iCloud processes constantly hogging CPU usage, even though I tried to disable all of it.

I noticed the Linux install instructions say to add the user to the video and render groups. I was able to do that and verify using the id command. Is that used for commercial skip? I cannot 100% verify this yet but it seems like the com skip is slower that it used to be. But I have only recorded a few things so far. For example, I recorded the Bears game from CBS-TVE yesterday, it was a 4 hour recording and it took 1 hr 18min to find the commercials. That is with 2 of 3 threads enabled for com skip. This is another thing that looks different on linux, I am now able to pick up to 3 threads whereas with the Apple OS I could only pick 1. Not really complaining but more just wanted to double check that I have things set up properly.

What is also somewhat interesting is that the CPU now shows up as a 4 core CPU instead of 2.

[maddox]

@evolution2147

the CPU now shows up as a 4 core CPU instead of 2

This is reporting # of threads, instead of cores. It's a multithreaded CPU with 2 threads per core.

[evolution2147]

Ok thanks, that is what I assumed just found it interesting that it is now reported differently.

As far as the video and render groups, what is that used for and how can I verify it is working correctly?

[NateTheBrewer]

In my experience with Linux and Windows, comskip uses CPU and not any sort of hardware transcoder.

When I was running an Intel 3rd gen i9 and gave comskip 6 threads a 30 minute show took 3-5 minutes to commercial detect.

You’re using the same generation but a mobile chip clocked a lot slower, and less threads, so the time it took doesn’t sound way beyond the norm, but I can’t explain why it would have taken less time on the Mac. Do you have recordings from the old setup you could reference, and then record the same show? When I tune how many cores I want to give to comskip I record local news in the same time slot before and after because it’s a lot of the same content and commercials.

Also, if I remember right, comskip and any software transcoding tasks don’t do very well with multithreaded environments. So with 2 cores/4 threads it might make more sense to set it to 2? If bet the storage bus needs processor overhead as well, so flooding the cpu with work could affect reading and writing to storage too…

[chDVRuser]

The best comparison test for how long it takes with different thread settings is to compare apples to apples.
Use the same recording and redetect commercials on it with different number of threads setting

[chDVRuser]

@evolution2147

As far as the video and render groups, what is that used for and how can I verify it is working correctly?

That's to enable hardware transcoding.

What is hardware video transcoding?

Summary Video decoding converts compressed data into a raw image with pixel-by-pixel color values. Video encoding takes a raw image and converts it into a compressed format Video transcoding converts from one compressed format to another, by first decoding then re-encoding Transcoding is used primarily when watching away from home, to compress the video so it uses up less bandwidth Video compression Video is transmitted using different codecs, which define how the pixel data is…

https://getchannels.com/docs/getting-started/faqs/subscription/#why-is-my-dvr-not-showing-a-hardware-transcoding-option