Is it possible for Comskip to run WHILE recording?

I swear when I was using Windows Media Center, years back, that comskip was running while the episode was recording, so I was able to skip commercials even if I only started watching with a short delay. For example, if an hour long show starts airing at 8pm, I often like to start watching at 8:17pm. Just enough of a delay to skip the commercials and end at the same time. It would be fantastic if comskip could already be processing those commercial breaks while it's airing, because I often find myself not being able to use the feature very much with the way I watch TV.

This is technically possible (although comskip accuracy is not as good when running live).

However at the moment it's not something Channels DVR can do.

I hope you can add it in the future. It might even be an idea to run it while recording, and then run it again after finished recording for more precise results which can replace the existing commercial detection when done.

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Yes, absolutely comskip can be run on live recordings. If you need help with it, observe how SageTV has been doing this for years.

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Are there any plans to run comskip on programs while they are recording? Comskip can be used like this.

It can, but its accuracy is less than when run on a recorded file. Also, it might be a detrimental impact on lower-powered machines that support Channels, such as ARM-based NAS devices.

I imagine software would provide a switch, if a user wanted to implement the comskip live tv function. That would probably take care of the small segment of users on hardware that can't handle it.

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I prefer to run Comskip after recordings complete ... I did some testing in SageTV with live and after ... got better results after recording was completed ... doing while Live sometimes only did half the recording.

I noticed the same in MythTV. Plus, the overhead of running a comskip process multiple times on the same content, or multiple times concurrently for multiple clients, is rather intensive.

Just because you can doesn't mean you should. I feel the trade-off for an overall better experience outweighs the few who want live commercial tagging. For those that demand additional features that may inhibit the overall experience, you are free to use the other existing software that provides these features.

Been doing it for years in SageTV. Works great when the user can start a football game about 1.5 hours after it starts and never have to watch a single commercial. Would be great to have it here, too.

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Just out of curiosity, if the developers here getting it working correctly, why would you NOT want it? Maybe the better question is, if you've never seen it work well, why would you want other users to be deprived of the feature?

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Because every feature added requires development time. So if the devs spend time developing this, there are other things that will not get done. Sure it would be nice to have everything, but with limited development resources, new features are in competition with each other.

Right. So you think they should work on something else?

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Yes, I believe there are other features that would be more beneficial to the product than this one.

Thanks for airing your opinion.

What I would like, is have it run commercial detection while it's recording, but then again after it's done. I often watch shows while they're airing, with just enough of a delay to skip commercials, so comskip running AFTER the show is done can be useless for most shows for me.

Of course they could provide different options for how this works.

I'm using this with SageTV and sports right now. It works great.

Would love to see this here, too, if the developers think it might be possible.

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Just a bump on this. With all the sports coming alive here in the covid era, just thought it would be great to implement it on live recordings that are stored on the server. Can't really see why not.

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Adding a +1 for running this while recording is happening. Especially for NFL games.

Why would it be less accurate running while recording? Asking out of curiosity.

Because of what it scans the video for. The more of it scanned, the better the accuracy.
Logo, closed captions, black frames, resolution and aspect ratio changes, number of audio channels, volume changes, etc.

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