Utility: ShowAnalyzer Beta

[marneb17]

Originally Posted by blade

Before I begin I should mention that my media server only has a celeron 366 (for the time being). If I set the priority to idle it takes 6 hours to process an hour long show, when set to low priority it cuts the time down to 1hr 48mins, but caused extreme stuttering during playback.

I guess my question is can I expect SA to play nice like comskip does and not hog too much of my cpu or is it just too demanding a program to run on my ancient cpu?

My guess would be that the problem was the hard drive and not the cpu. The free mode uses the hdd much more. Right?!?

Marneb

[Jere_Jones]

Originally Posted by marneb17

The free mode uses the hdd much more. Right?!?

Correct. The free mode will read the file a minimum of 3 times. Normal mode can get away with only once. Excluding any rewinds for edge detection, of course.

Jere

[Jere_Jones]

Originally Posted by DFA

In future developement, would there be any advantage to SA automatically saving these images so that it did not have to spend the time to search for them for other files being analyzed for the same channel? No doubt such things have crossed your mind.

I have thought long and hard about this. I'm not sure about the effectiveness from one show to another. The edge profiles have gotten much more advanced since logo detection. I will look into it, but it certainly won't be as a saved bmp or jpg. I throw away a lot of information just to display it.

Originally Posted by malore

I've seen several edge profiles that have shown a long 1-800-BLA-BLAA banner ad instead of a channel logo.

I wouldn't worry about those profiles. If no profile is matched for a while (as I would expect from a commercial's profile), then it will rewind to the last positive match and start searching again. SA keeps track of these various profiles and only scores the most common one. When I say one, it actually can be more than one, because every new profile is compared against the others and profiles that are similar enough are considered to be the same.

Originally Posted by malore

Also it might then be possible to clean up the noise in the image.

The edge profiles are already filtered to get rid of the useless noise. What is left is valuable to the matching process. When I was writing it, I ran the profiles through a variety of filters and finally found that a single 3x3 erode was perfect.

Originally Posted by malore

Of course the usefulness of this all depends on how consistent the channel logo is between programs. Anyone know the answer to that?

I suspect the consistancy is low, but I really don't know. I'll have to do some checks.

Jere

[hchucky]

I am currently running ShowAnalyzer (in demo mode w/ key) with DirMon and every so often it will hang on a show. I currently have it setup to start analyzing a show if the *.txt file does not exit. So far every time that it has hung it has been on a show that I'll watch but not record. I may not even finish watching the show.

I am using the default settings in ShowAnalyzer and have included my DirMon.ini file below. Attached is the status window from ShowAnalyser. Also when I view the text file associated with the show all it says is the following:

FILE PROCESSING COMPLETE
------------------------

Interesting. I just noticed that the show that it hung on has three mpg files KARE11NewsSunrise-3704212-0.mpg, KARE11NewsSunrise-3704212-1.mpg, KARE11NewsSunrise-3704212-2.mpg. Each has it's own text file with the same contents as listed above. Basicaly saying that the processing is complete but not listing any commerical breaks.

DirMon.ini
; DirMon initialization file
; Copyright (c) 2005
; Jeremiah M. Jones
; DO NOT EDIT MANUALLY
Version = 0.2
StartInTray = 1
Frequency = 300
WhileLive = 1
WhileRecording = 1
Directories = U:\\Video,Y:\\Video
Source = mpg,mpeg
Target = txt,log,ccyes,ccno,VPrj,mpg.xml
[Processor 0]
Path = "C:\Program Files\Dragon Global\ShowAnalyzer\ShowAnalyzer.exe"
Hide = 1
Ignore = DoratheExplorer*,ThomasFriends*,MadMoney*,EasyListening*
DoesExistLogic = OR
BothLogic = AND
DoesNotExistTrigger1 = txt
DoesNotExistLogic = AND

[marneb17]

Aloha,
i tried your software and right now I get, sorry to say, really bad results. I tried several half hour shows. Here in Germany most of those sit-coms are interrupted by only one commercial segment. It is about 7 to 8 minutes long. The ads during movies are shorter, but since I hardly ever record movies with SageTV, I don't now how SA is doing there.

I have changed the setting to 480 seconds for longest commercial segment and then tried it. All I got was a four minute long segment in the middle of the file. But the first ~2 min were still the show and the rest part of the ads.

I really don't know how to tweak it.
After looking at the recognized logo i lowered the score for that, but that only gave me an additional com segment in the 2. half of the file with no ads, only show.
I have added the logo file that was created for the show and two screenshots. The first shows, that the logo is not displayed right after the end of commercials, but is replaced for about 10 seconds with the name of the show. And the second screenshot shows the normal show.

Does anybody have good results for Germany?

Any help is welcome
Marne

[Jere_Jones]

Originally Posted by hchucky

I am currently running ShowAnalyzer (in demo mode w/ key) with DirMon and every so often it will hang on a show. I currently have it setup to start analyzing a show if the *.txt file does not exit. So far every time that it has hung it has been on a show that I'll watch but not record. I may not even finish watching the show.

Do you have the third party decoders in your ShowAnalyzer directory? If you do, try removing them and see if SA will run. If it won't run, then the problem is that you are running in free mode. I have been told that an uninstall/reinstall/reregister fixes this (I haven't been able to duplicate it).

If you're not using the third party decoders then can you determine if the file is getting deleted while SA is working on it? My system will not allow this, but maybe your system does.

Jere

[Jere_Jones]

Originally Posted by marneb17

Aloha,
i tried your software and right now I get, sorry to say, really bad results. I tried several half hour shows. Here in Germany most of those sit-coms are interrupted by only one commercial segment. It is about 7 to 8 minutes long. The ads during movies are shorter, but since I hardly ever record movies with SageTV, I don't now how SA is doing there.

I don't have any half hour shows from Germany. I do have a couple of one hour shows that have good results. Would you care to supply me with a couple shows that I can use to improve SA? If you wouldn't mind uploading them to my server, PM or email me and I'll send you the server info.

Jere

[malore]

The reception on one of my cable channels is very poor and prevents showanaylzer from detecting any commercials on it. This got me thinking that it might be useful to have a bunch of people record the exact same airing of a show. Then comparing the results using some kind of logged data, to see how much variation there is between systems using different capture cards and different signal sources.

[insomniac]

let me know what show at what time

[hchucky]

Originally Posted by Jere_Jones

Do you have the third party decoders in your ShowAnalyzer directory? If you do, try removing them and see if SA will run. If it won't run, then the problem is that you are running in free mode. I have been told that an uninstall/reinstall/reregister fixes this (I haven't been able to duplicate it).

If you're not using the third party decoders then can you determine if the file is getting deleted while SA is working on it? My system will not allow this, but maybe your system does.

Jere

I do not have any the third party decoders in the ShowAnalyzer directory. I simply downloaded ShowAnalyzer and obtained a demo key and that is how it is currently being run. Besides other than the ocasional hang it is working great. I even deleted all the text files for my current recordings and reprocessed them with ShowAnalyzer to get more acurate results.

The file is not being deleted while ShowAnalyzer is working on it. With that said though I'm sure Sage is trying to delete it because I probably changed channels mid show. I just looked and the files that it hung on are still present in my videos directory but they do not show up in Sage. Interesting.

HC

[pjwerdna]

Hi All

Currently trying this in free mode to see how well it does at detecting and if my system can cope etc.

I've downloaded the 2 extra bits and put them in C:\Program Files\Dragon Global\ShowAnalyzer

When trying on an mpg file (recorded at DVD extra long play) I get an error almost immediately.
FAILED(hr=0x80040154) in CreateFilter(CLSID_MPEG2Split, &pMPEG2Split)
Clicking OK on this seems to continue the scan, but the txt files are empty.

Any thoughts or do I need a trial key?

[rsagetv99]

This is gonna sound like a dumb question, but this is my first time looking at this thread. What is the advantage of ShowAnalyzer compared with ComSkip?

[stanger89]

The pay version, is several times faster than comskip (SA runs at about 450 fps on my Athlon64). I believe it's more accurate also. But probably the biggest advantage, is that it's under active development, and Jere's got some really cool ideas coming.

[Jere_Jones]

[EDIT]
You must resave your settings after you upgrade. Do this by opening SAConfig and clicking on "Save All" in the File menu.
[/EDIT]

New version up. This one includes the schoolhouse. Enjoy...

Jere

Oh, change list:
- Channel numbers from the SageTV webserver that contain letters won't cause SA to crash.
- Improved error tolerance in audio decoder.
- Fixed "-ini" command line parameter
- Renamed length evaluations to be less confusing
- The status window will now show if it is running in free or normal mode
- School House - NEW! Enjoy.
- Registering will now delete the old key(s).
- Started adding advanced settings to SAConfig. First settings to be added: custom borders for each side.

[stanger89]

Is it just me, or is it not there yet?

[Jere_Jones]

Originally Posted by stanger89

Is it just me, or is it not there yet?

stanger89: I had to pull it real quick because the settings files are not backwards compatible. Since I didn't want anyone losing customized settings, I needed to add some code so that it would correctly read old ini files.

It's up now.

Everyone: Make SURE that you open SAConfig and resave all your settings!!

Jere

[stanger89]

Any destructions for the "Schoolhouse"?

[Jason]

Originally Posted by stanger89

Any destructions for the "Schoolhouse"?

It looks straightforward... however the checkboxes do not allow themselves to be selected or deselected, thus not allowing you to save your changes...

-Jason

EDIT: Jere says that the info screen (with checkboxes...) are just for display... make your changes in the settings screen.

[sleonard]

Should we uninstall the previous version or can we install over top of it?

Can't wait to see it

[Jere_Jones]

Originally Posted by sleonard

Should we uninstall the previous version or can we install over top of it?

http://www.dragonglobal.org/forums/showthread.php?t=143

Jere