Enhanced commercial detection and comskip fail over 80% of the time

GTFan · August 23, 2026, 12:16am

This is in my experience. And there's no way to add those commercials that are missing in the web UI, to try to help out enhanced detection.

I very rarely see a show or event that is correctly flagged. Most of the shows and events that I've seen have logos that could be detected and flagged for commercials but for whatever reason that doesn't happen.

I tried to post that maybe we just should abandon comskip and use AI to generate a new program that more accurately detects logos etc. in the enhanced commercial detection thread but all that stuff got deleted. So I'm posting it here.

Thoughts?

JefferMC · August 23, 2026, 1:09am

Are you trying the beta with advanced comskip?

GTFan · August 23, 2026, 1:32am

Please elaborate. I'm running latest pre-release DVR with the latest ED sigs. I don't know what advanced comskip means. ED is enabled.

Look, most of what I watch is sports and the detection rate on that is very poor. The only channel that is reliable is CBS, everything else is just a mishmash of mis-detected commercials or non-detected commercials. But even for the non-sports stuff the detection is not working, I posted that since CNN went DRM the CNN shows are not being detected correctly. Just an example, I've seen it plenty across all kinds of non-sports stuff. The bottom line is that it's failing.

@eric has posted before that the problem is that there's not a lot of sports event submissions for ED. I would love to do that if I could flag missing commercials but I can't.

But IMO the real problem is that almost all of these events have logos that could be detected and for whatever reason they're not.

eric · August 23, 2026, 1:46am

As we said before:

You can find the comskip source code here:

github.com

erikkaashoek/Comskip/blob/master/comskip.c

//
// comskip.c
// Copyright (C) 2004 Scott Michael
// Based on the work of Chris Pinkham of MythTV
// comskip is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
// it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
// the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
// (at your option) any later version.
// comskip is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
// but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
// MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
// GNU General Public License for more details.
// You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
// along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
// Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307 USA
#include "platform.h"
#include "vo.h"
#include <argtable2.h>
#include <pthread.h>

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GTFan · August 23, 2026, 1:47am

You need to abandon comskip and move on with AI @eric. Please, move on. It's not working.

If you're saying that you own the comskip code in channels then please consider changes to fix it.

Can you address why logo detection is not the number one priority?

Morris_Altman · August 23, 2026, 1:55am

The vast majority of the movies I watch are perfect or so close that I don't mind. For example a Pluto logo might flash for less than a second. In most cases if the commercial skip were not flashed on my screen I would not know it happened. It's not perfect and for those remaining times, I use my remote. I'm happy to say that false positives are mostly a thing of the past.

GTFan · August 23, 2026, 1:56am

Yup, not live. Great that it works for you for old stuff.

Live is the prob imo.

Morris_Altman · August 23, 2026, 2:13am

Oh, live commercial skipping has never worked correctly. I tried it and turned it off very quickly. I tired it the other day as somebody stated it was working well for them. I found it is still terrible.

As I recall the developers did not want to implement it as they did not think it would work well. They gave in to community pressure.

My advice, uncheck live commercial skipping and move on.

GTFan · August 23, 2026, 2:14am

If live doesn't work they should disable it, and they should state that it's unreliable.

UPDATE: tried disabling live detection for shows being watched yesterday, made no difference across all the sports that I watch. Still a complete jumble of correctly found segments, false positives, and missed segments.

GTFan · August 24, 2026, 5:56pm

Couple thoughts:

What if you go gather up as many video clips from all the channels that you can get a hold of and feed them into an LLM that can look for patterns and generate skip code? That was kind of what I was getting at with using AI, the more data it gets the better it gets at finding the skip issue that you want to solve. This would need to be with all sorts of video data like shows, news, sports events, movies, documentaries whatever. Something to chip away at over time maybe.

What if there's a per channel config option for comskip or whatever so that you can tweak exactly where the logos are or any particular hints about how that channel runs. Yeah I know this would be a lot of options but don't you already do something like this with TVE today for native detection? CNN detection worked perfectly before when it was native (not DRM'd) so I'm assuming there must have been some sort of per channel config.

Additionally, you could concentrate on all of the most watched channels and ignore all of the FAST stuff. Try to cover the most amount of views in other words.

Just random thoughts.