Utility: ShowAnalyzer Beta

[geogecko]

Is there a way to tell SA not to process the last ~2 minutes of a recording? A lot of shows have "previews" for next week's show, and I keep finding these being detected as part of the commercial segment. Right now, I'm adding +2 minutes to the shows that I know have previews, in SageTV, but their being skipped, and I'm sure you all know, it's hard to rewind at the last minute of a show, at least for me, it is.

[Jere_Jones]

As time goes on, I learn that people's definition of "commercial" is different. As an example, for me, if it isn't a variable part of the show it must be a commercial. I mean that opening credits, closing credits, parts of other shows, etc. all count as "commercial". This opinion is not shared by everyone and is one of the reasons I think a "global" commercial database will never work. Some people want the opening credits, but not the closing credits. Some people want the network previews of other shows, some don't. Ummm... am I on a soap box right now?

Wow. That had absolutely nothing to do with your question. But it is a valid point so I won't delete it.

To answer your question, I don't think it will be that hard. The hardest part is working out the user interface for setting the option. I'll put it on my todo list.

Jere

[ToxMox]

I wouldn't mind seeing this feature as well. I'm constantly having to go back into the recording to see the last minute.

[waynedunham]

Opening and closing credits are very often part of the show, especially in sitcoms. Heck sometimes the best part of a sitcom episode might be the outtakes that sometimes are shown during the closing credits.

[geogecko]

Oh, I totally agree Jere. Not everyone will want the same thing, nor will every network do their opening/closing credits the same.

Take for instance, the TV show Joey. I get the opening sequence to this show every time, because the episode transitions to the opening sequence, and then back out of it, right back into the episode, with no commercials. SA doesn't take it out, because I assume, it thinks it's part of the show.

The nice thing about adding the feature to untouch the first/last minutes of a show, is that it has nothing to do with commercial detection, just telling SA to ignore up to so many minutes.

There are so many features that could be added, you will be busy for a long time. I'm just glad you are willing to consider new additions to your tools.

[EDIT]

There is only one problem I could see happening, is during "Live TV" commercial detection. Since the show hasn't finished, SA doesn't know where the end of the show will be, until the show finishes recording. That's just something to keep in mind. Maybe, what would have to happen, is keep processing everything, even the last 2 minutes (for example), then when the show ended, it edited the txt file to remove the commercial detections for the given time frame.

The only problem with doing it that way, would be that if you happened to be watching the show time-shifted by only a minute (unlikely), then you might still get the commercials. However, maybe that's not a problem, since most commercial breaks tend to be more than a minute long...

[Blue]

We've noticed that with our Everybody Loves Raymond recordings, the last few minutes are usually detected as commercials. Most of it actually is commercials, followed by a short preview, but the last ~1 minute of the show (following the preview) usually gets skipped.

[geogecko]

Can't wait for the "Show Start/End Time To Ignore Commercial Detection" settings...

I can deal with 1~2 minutes worth of commercials...

Funny, the wife moaned last night, "I don't get the chance to 'rest my eyes' during the commercials anymore..." I think deep down inside, she really likes it, so don't take offense, Jere.

[michelkenny]

Now that I'm used to SageTV and Show Analyser, I can't imagine myself living without it. I don't watch live tv anymore... I just record everything and watch it commercial free later on in the evening. Yesterday I went to my friend's house to watch a tv show (normal TV) and I was like "I can't watch this, it has commercials!". Then I realised how spoiled (and better off) I am with Show Analyser

[waynedunham]

Originally Posted by michelkenny

Now that I'm used to SageTV and Show Analyser, I can't imagine myself living without it. I don't watch live tv anymore... I just record everything and watch it commercial free later on in the evening. Yesterday I went to my friend's house to watch a tv show (normal TV) and I was like "I can't watch this, it has commercials!". Then I realised how spoiled (and better off) I am with Show Analyser

I got so used to hitting the "3 Quick-Skip" and then "Quick-Skip and/or Replay" buttons on my ReplayTV remote over the years to skip commercials.
Whenever I'm somewhere else I find myself looking for the Quick-Skip button on the remote. Realize it's not there and mumble "*MY* Tv doesn't have commercials".

I still haven't tried setting up commercial skip in Sage yet. My newer ReplayTV's mark the commecials so all you have to do is hit one button to skip the commercial. However depending on the program being recorded it's anywhere from 50% to 100% accurate. Also depends on how strong and/or garbled my Analog cable signal is on that night. When the signal is weak the commercial detection is practically no-existant.
One of these days I'll set it up.

[briands]

Originally Posted by michelkenny

Now that I'm used to SageTV and Show Analyser, I can't imagine myself living without it. I don't watch live tv anymore... I just record everything and watch it commercial free later on in the evening. Yesterday I went to my friend's house to watch a tv show (normal TV) and I was like "I can't watch this, it has commercials!". Then I realised how spoiled (and better off) I am with Show Analyser

I have noticed thought that I don't even know what new shows there are, or movies at the theater, or news. Someone at work was talking about a storm down south...

[michelkenny]

Originally Posted by briands

I have noticed thought that I don't even know what new shows there are, or movies at the theater, or news. Someone at work was talking about a storm down south...

I've also noticed this. Whenever my friends talk about movie or new show previews in between regular shows, I never know what they are talking about because I always skip them

[geogecko]

Hmm...not sure what this issue is, but here we go.

Started recording Numb3rs tonight, and started watching it after about 20 minutes of the show had been recorded. It had already detected one commercial break, and looked like it had at least another 10 minutes of show after that. The first commercial break came, but no skippy. After about 20 seconds of the commercial went by, I get skippy (no overlap though, it ended at the correct time).

From that point on, no more commercial breaks were detected. Is this because I have DirMon set to check just every 5 minutes, or some other issue. Once the show was over, I stopped and restarted it, and all the commercial breaks were now in the show.

The only thing I've changed, since it seemed to work last, was I updated SageTV to 3.0.11. I then re-installed SageMC 16x9, then over wrote the STV file with the ToxMox STV file (to include live updating of the txt file). I had to reselect the STV in the detailed setup, and change themes. After all that was done, I did a reboot of the system.

[Jere_Jones]

It appears as if the STV wasn't reloading the .txt file.

Jere

[geogecko]

Darn it, I thought I already had that one cleared up. I think you are right, the first commercial detection probably happened when I loaded the file...

Maybe I didn't extract the right STV file...back to the drawing board. Probably operator error.

[DFA]

Have not stayed current with the thread so I apologize in advance if my comments are redunant and already known or fixable issue.

It is known and accepted that SA as well as ComSkip can not yet process TS files (in less I've missed some news).

When SA encounters an ".mpg" file which is TS, it produces a log file in its home directory to the effect that a TS container was encountered. SA then closes w/o producing a ".txt" file. As a result, DirMon restarts SA to process the same TS file again with the same no-can-do response from SA. This just keeps going on indefinitly with log files piling up in the SA home directory.

It seems to me that if SA would produce a zeo-byte ".txt" file for TS files or any other files it encounters that it can not process, that would keep DirMon off its back.

If there is some config param to resolve this, it seems it should be engaged by default. Please advise if this can be fixed by some param I am unaware of.

Thanks.
DFA

[Jere_Jones]

I thought I had already written the desired behavior into SA, but after reviewing the code, I didn't.

I have now. The next version will behave as you have requested.

Jere

[JasonJoel]

Ah, good. I am having this issue as well. In fact I posted something to that effect on your forums this weekend.

Very much looking forward to this fix!


Jason

Originally Posted by Jere_Jones

I thought I had already written the desired behavior into SA, but after reviewing the code, I didn't.

I have now. The next version will behave as you have requested.

Jere

[briands]

Originally Posted by Jere_Jones

I thought I had already written the desired behavior into SA, but after reviewing the code, I didn't.

I have now. The next version will behave as you have requested.

Jere

Maybe a better solution would be to just make it work on .ts files

[DFA]

I think everyone would second that. Unfortunately, I suspect that may be an entirely different kettle of fish. With Sage now directly supporting popular OTA HD cards, TS files are going to become common place and mixed with MPEG-PS files.

Jere, what are the technical hurdles to analyzing TS files? Is it a biggy? Since not implemented, I took it as a given that there were significant barriers.

DFA

[michelkenny]

One thing that I can guess is that it will require MUCH more processing by the CPU to process TS files.