Hey all,
I'm using a Mac Mini M1 for my DVR server and I currently have commercial skip detection threads set to 2. Is that the best option for me or should I go up? Any advice would be appreciated.
The best number is what works for you.
Each thread uses one CPU core.
Depends on what else the machine is being used for.
The more threads you use, the faster it detects commercials.
But it's a case of diminishing returns, so 4 threads is not 4X as fast as 1.
Best to experiment with a single H.264 recording of an hour or more and try different settings while recomskipping the same recording.
Check the DVR log to see how fast it finished and watch your CPU usage.
You can go from CPU looking for things to do up to it's overheating (but probably not on a Mac Mini M1).
Here was my experience with my NAS How many cores for ComSkip with 4 available?
Here's the explanation from the developer of comskip
thread_count=2 (1-16)
Number of threads used when decoding the video
Increasing the thread count speeds up the processing on CPU's with more cores then the current thread count.
Setting the number to higher then the amount of cores makes processing slower.
Setting the thread_count to 1 disables multi-threaded decoding, useful in case
comskip crashes when decoding the video.
So in your case (I think M1's are 8 core) you could try from 1-7 to see how much it speeds up commercial detection (comskip).