Sometimes (some channels in particular) comskip just doesn't work. For example, BBC channels here in the UK don't have commercials.
I'd love to be able to just manually mark the start and end of a show / movie. It would save the CPU intensive automated checking that doesn't really work for these channels and wouldn't really be any slower than doing the verify commercials process that I find I typically have to do anyway even on recordings where comskip worked.
I'm wondering if there's a manual way of doing this by editing .EDL files? I've tried but channels doesn't seem to pay any attention to the edits, presumably because the .EDL files are an export rather than the actual settings for the recording?
This already exists. You can edit commercial breaks in the DVR web UI.
If it’s the “edit commercials” option via web, or “verify commercials” via the app, that isn’t what I’m talking about.
If there’s a way of specifying the exact start and end point, to nearest second for example, via the web interface I’d love to know how this is done?
Is this the interface you were referring to? Because this show actually starts at 2m58s into the recording. No way to set that as the start point.
It ends at 17m12s. No way to set that.
I guess I’m confused. Not sure what you mean by “set the start and end point”. Are you saying you want to essentially trim the front and end of the recording, discarding some of it? If so there is no way to do that. The EDL files you mentioned are part of the comskip process, I believe. You could mark the point up to your preferred start point a commercial and then another long commercial at the end. The content would be there but you could more easily skip it I guess?
Yes, that’s all I want. I just want to be able to manually set the start and end of the show / movie. Not trying to trim. Just want to input the precise time or set the exact point in the timeline where everything before is treated as commercials for the start and everything after is treated as commercials for the end.
Conskip is a two step process from what I understand. There is the detection bit where the system tried to identify blocks of video and determine which are commercial and which are show / movie. From what I can tell by looking at the EDL files, the output from the detection process is little more than some times in seconds.
The second part of the process is playback skipping the commercials by reading the times in the EDL files.
As the data output from the comskip detection process is so basic, I really don’t see why there can’t be a way to edit these via a simple UI. Either inputting numbers in seconds or preferably moving the playback timeline to a desired locations and hitting a button to mark the start and end.
The problem with the system as it stands is that you can only choose which blocks are commercials and which are show / movie. It only works if comskip identifies the blocks correctly. In the example above, it didn’t. Not even close.
So I need a way of inputting the data directly without relying on the first, CPU intensive part of the process.
I don't know how to do that without trimming the video. I just use avidemux to save the .mpg file as a .mp4 file, setting A at the movie start and B at the movie end. The .mp4 file is then added to my movies or tv folders as appropriate. Great quality with embedded subtitles, but file sizes are large, because the video is not being compressed. We have the same scenario as you do re: commercials here with TCM movies.
Yeah, I don’t think it is possible. Hence why this is a feature request.
The essence of the request is that comskip does a lot of CPU work to calculate where different blocks of a recording are on the timeline. And then makes a decent stab at which are commercials and which are not.
Ultimately though, it seems to just store these as text identifying the blocks by second. It shouldn’t be hard to create a UI where these can be inserted manually rather than relying on the semi-reliable comskip calculation.
You might be able to create your own start/end markers wrapped in a JSON payload and then do a PATCH /dvr/files/${FILEID} to cause Channels to see your specified values.
Not sure if it would work, but definitely an avenue you could pursue.
Thanks, that sounds like a lot of hassle for something that I'd like to ideally just mark as I'm watching something so that it is saved for subsequent watches.
