Commercial skipping with PlayOn Home

Channels Android TV Troubleshooting
#1

I’m a relatively new user of Channels, and Channels led me to discover PlayOn Cloud and PlayOn Home as options to look into, which I’m starting to experiment with now.

When I watch TV in the living room from my Nvidia Shield, I’m finding that commercials are not getting automatically skipped with my PlayOn Home (not Cloud) recordings. A few debug observations:

  • My PlayOn Home recording area is configured as a local TV source on the Channels server.
  • Automatic commercial skipping is working as I’d expect on broadcast DVR recordings.
  • I THINK that PlayOn Cloud commercials were skipped as I’d expect. That experiment was a couple weeks ago, but I don’t remember noting a problem.
  • PlayOn Home seems to be correctly flagging where the commercials are, based on the light purple vs dark purple segments of the timeline bar during playback.
  • These commercials tend to be 15 to 45 seconds long, if that matters.
  • When I view the same PlayOn Home recording on my iPad, the commercials are automatically skipped. It’s only on the Nvidia Shield that they aren’t skipping.
  • I’ve confirmed that the settings on the Shield are set to auto-skip, and that’s working as expected for DVR recordings. Is there a different setting area per source?
  • If I go into the server admin page and tell Channels to re-detect commercials for a particular recording, those WILL be auto-skipped. But it significantly over-marked the one test video I tried and skipped me over some real scenes.

Any advice on what I should try next?

Thanks!

#2

The 15 second commercials will not skip, longer ones should. My experience with PlayOn with Channels DVR has been mixed, mostly because PlayOn is rather glitchy and has produced a number of pore recordings. I don't trust there commercial cutter as what's cut is gone for ever. I've had recordings change formats while recording on PlayOn. I've watched the video using VLC to prove that it's a bad PlayOn file. At least they are nice about refunds.

#3

Thanks for sharing your experience, since anything I’m learning over the next week or two will be only a small part of what I should expect longer term if I were to stick with PlayOn.

But the problems that I’m seeing today don’t seem to be related to the problems you’ve had.

PlayOn Home is marking commercials for me, not cutting them out. I can see in the Channels UI where Channels appears to be reading those markings, and the iPad version of the app is even skipping them correctly. It’s just not skipping on my Shield for the big TV in the living room.

For the poor recordings, was that PlayOn Cloud or Home? I’ve had a few percent of the Home recordings fail partway through and only get a part of the show, which has been my second big annoyance other than figuring out what I’m doing wrong with commercial skipping :wink:

#4

Channels is marking the commercials after download. Take a look at the log. You can view it from the support tab of the Web UI. Channels attaches via PlayOn Cloud.

As you are having a deferent experience using the two player apps, try the beta version of the Android app. If that dose not correct it create a support ticket so the developers can fix this. I seem to remember somone else reporting this. I've had a few strange commercial skipping issues with the Android app yet not as clear as yours to report the issue.

#5

I checked the log, and I don't think this is true in my case.

It may be how PlayOn Cloud works, but I'm using PlayOn Home right now, which is a tool running on the same headless Windows server in my house that Channels DVR is running on and has no cloud component. From my reading, I don't think the PlayOn source definition works with the Home product, so I've set my PlayOn Home recording folder as a local source library. (If the PlayOn integration does work with Home and not just Cloud, then that's a place where I'm doing the wrong thing!)

The log for a show doesn't have any lines like "[DVR] Running commercial detection on file 447" that I'd see on DVR recordings where Channels is marking the commercials.

2023/10/15 17:24:15.052851 [IDX] Generating video index for file-444: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D\Season 2\Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. - s02e01 - Shadows.mp4
2023/10/15 17:24:15.053391 [ERR] Generating video index for file-444 failed: Couldn't open file: D:\PlayOnHome\Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D\Season 2\Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. - s02e01 - Shadows.mp4: open D:\PlayOnHome\Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D\Season 2\Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. - s02e01 - Shadows.mp4: The process cannot access the file because it is being used by another process.
2023/10/15 17:24:15.544731 [SCN] Imported TV episode #444 Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D\Season 2\Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. - s02e01 - Shadows.mp4
2023/10/15 17:39:15.686643 [SCN] Reprocessing metadata for TV episode #444 Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D\Season 2\Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. - s02e01 - Shadows.mp4: 453335994 != 126173995
2023/10/15 17:39:15.817626 [ERR] Could not probe file 444: exit status 1
2023/10/15 17:54:15.992400 [SCN] Ignoring episode with recent modification: D:\PlayOnHome\Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D\Season 2\Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. - s02e01 - Shadows.mp4
2023/10/15 17:59:16.033842 [SCN] Reprocessing metadata for TV episode #444 Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D\Season 2\Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. - s02e01 - Shadows.mp4: 917036854 != 508262357
2023/10/15 17:59:16.198453 [ERR] Could not probe file 444: exit status 1
2023/10/15 18:09:16.333446 [SCN] Reprocessing metadata for TV episode #444 Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D\Season 2\Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. - s02e01 - Shadows.mp4: 1164837753 != 1017452233

Trying to Beta client is a good idea. I'll figure out how to do that either tonight or tomorrow night, whenever I get some good debugging time.

Thanks again!

#6

PlayOn's naming is confusing. Configure the PlayOn Cloud as a Source for Channels DVR. Fill out the form with your account etc. Channels will check for completed recordings every two hours and when it finds them it will download them and mark commercials.

You schedule the recordings with the PlayOn Phone App. Channels DVR will do the rest.