Utility: ShowAnalyzer Beta

[Jere_Jones]

Originally Posted by stanger89

Any destructions for the "Schoolhouse"?

I wrote up some notes about it here. If there is anything that isn't clear or could be improved, just let me know.

Jere

[abasu2003]

i think i'm having some problems with mine. I'm assuming its supposed to shwo you where it thinks it found commercials. Mine either isn't doing this or it doesnt' think anything is a commercial...either way kind of bad

[Jere_Jones]

Originally Posted by abasu2003

i think i'm having some problems with mine. I'm assuming its supposed to shwo you where it thinks it found commercials. Mine either isn't doing this or it doesnt' think anything is a commercial...either way kind of bad

Judging by the missing score modifiers, I'm assuming that you haven't followed my directions and numerous warnings. Open SAConfig and "Save All".

Then try again and I'm sure you will have better results.

Jere

[abasu2003]

Originally Posted by Jere_Jones

Judging by the missing score modifiers, I'm assuming that you haven't followed my directions and numerous warnings. Open SAConfig and "Save All".

Then try again and I'm sure you will have better results.

Jere

yup...i should also point out that the time bar doesn;t seem to update on apply changes...you have to click the time bar....or i'm not waiting long enough.

i will say after playing around with this, the one thing that i am seeing is that the edge profile isn't being caught as much as it should be, at least with the few shows i've tried it on. any way to change the strictness of the edge profiling?

EDIT: a few other quick thoughts:

-i increase and decrease the "Shortest Possible Show Segment" and it doesn't seem to have much of an effect. Specifically, I am wondering why scenes end up being "Low Probability" while they are only 7 seconds long and should come out as "TOO SHORT"

-In the future, can you make it so that you can change the score thresholds for ocmmercial. I have a few scenes that i have tinkered to get to 14.7 but they still aren't showing up as commericals, and all of my show segments are 2 or lower.

but this was a great idea. it makes it so much easier to debug and understand whats going on. its the first real chance i've had to tinker with settings and with all the extra feedback from everybody, no doubt it will increase SA's accuracy exponentially.

[Jere_Jones]

Originally Posted by abasu2003

yup...i should also point out that the time bar doesn;t seem to update on apply changes...you have to click the time bar....or i'm not waiting long enough.

Found and fixed. Oh, there is a bug tracker in the ShowAnalyzer forum that helps me document and not forget about any bugs.

Originally Posted by abasu2003

i will say after playing around with this, the one thing that i am seeing is that the edge profile isn't being caught as much as it should be, at least with the few shows i've tried it on. any way to change the strictness of the edge profiling?

That will probably end up in the advanced settings eventually.

Jere

[Jere_Jones]

Originally Posted by abasu2003

-i increase and decrease the "Shortest Possible Show Segment" and it doesn't seem to have much of an effect. Specifically, I am wondering why scenes end up being "Low Probability" while they are only 7 seconds long and should come out as "TOO SHORT"

Too Short specifies that the length was under 5 seconds. It is useful for those marker scenes (think of the Mythbusters). Shortest possible show segment is for the final marking. Say you have a series of High Probability blocks with a Low Probability block in the middle that has an edge profile. If it's length is lower than the "Shortest Possible Show Segment", it will get changed to be a commercial.

Originally Posted by abasu2003

-In the future, can you make it so that you can change the score thresholds for ocmmercial. I have a few scenes that i have tinkered to get to 14.7 but they still aren't showing up as commericals, and all of my show segments are 2 or lower.

Good idea. But I think I'm about to redo the Commercial/Show judgement thing. Having set thresholds works great if you only have one or two possible sources of information, but add more and it doesn't work at all. It will probably end up as a "Make more commercials <-----> Make more show" slider.

Originally Posted by abasu2003

but this was a great idea. it makes it so much easier to debug and understand whats going on. its the first real chance i've had to tinker with settings and with all the extra feedback from everybody, no doubt it will increase SA's accuracy exponentially.

I appreciate all feedback on this. The school house is what will (probably) seperate SA from any other commercial detection programs.

Jere

[sleonard]

I just gotta say it.


Schoolhouse Rocks!

[mikesm]

Jere, great work on SA - it seems to be getting better and better. One question - have folks talked to the VLC folks or other player developers about incorporating the .txt file format for skip info into VLC or XBMC?

The reason I ask is that my ReplayTV's .evt./.ndx file (the equivalent of .txt for Sage) is supported by VLC, which also can stream from the replay. This means I can watch commercial skipped programming on any VLC system, windows, linux, etc...

My wife likes this too, as I have trained her how to watch it from her computer. VLC is an open source product, so it may not be that hard to get the .txt file format included (though why did you choose the .txt extension? It would seem to be better to have a new extension to flag it specifically as commercial metadata).

I know the VideoRedo folks were working on adding support for it too, though their native product may negate that. They already support the BeyondTV skip data info for cutting.

It sure would be nice if there was a standardized format for commercial tagging info so all our players and tools could use it.

Thanks,
Mike

[Jere_Jones]

Originally Posted by mikesm

Jere, great work on SA - it seems to be getting better and better. One question - have folks talked to the VLC folks or other player developers about incorporating the .txt file format for skip info into VLC or XBMC?

Not that I know of.

Originally Posted by mikesm

The reason I ask is that my ReplayTV's .evt./.ndx file (the equivalent of .txt for Sage) is supported by VLC

If you give me some samples of those ReplayTV files (or point me to something that makes them), I'll add them to SA's output capability.

Originally Posted by mikesm

VLC is an open source product, so it may not be that hard to get the .txt file format included

That would really be up to them. You could ask them though.

Originally Posted by mikesm

(though why did you choose the .txt extension? It would seem to be better to have a new extension to flag it specifically as commercial metadata).

There is a long history behind this(see the commercial advance beta thread). The simple answer is that .txt was what malore chose.

Originally Posted by mikesm

I know the VideoRedo folks were working on adding support for it too, though their native product may negate that. They already support the BeyondTV skip data info for cutting.

So does SA. SA will output VideoRedo project files and BeyondTV SmartSkip files.

Originally Posted by mikesm

It sure would be nice if there was a standardized format for commercial tagging info so all our players and tools could use it.

I agree.

Jere

[sleonard]

Originally Posted by mikesm

why did you choose the .txt extension? It would seem to be better to have a new extension to flag it specifically as commercial metadata

There's probably too much momentum behind the .txt files but I agree also. Just in case I'll propose .skp or .cskp and .adfree. Maybe someone could even whip up a cool icon to associate with the extension.

[mikesm]

Thanks for the info! Here's a link to the code for parsing replaytv commercial skip files. The author says it's pretty portable code, and works fine on Linux, Windows, etc...

Being compatible with these would also mean that VLC should be able to play the files with commercial advance too, since it already parses these files.

It sure sounds like it would be less work for everyone if there was a common format, but I can see how it's easier to implement everyone elses format that to cooperate on common format... :-)

Thanks,
Mike

[abbott_m]

OK, well after massive upgrades today (Sage 3.0, Webserver, etc) I finally got around to ditching comskip and getting dirmon/showanalyser running. Only thing I can't figure out is how to keep it from detecting shows recorded on the movie channels. I read somewhere that the webserver integration does something along those lines but I saw no change in the webserver pages.

Any ideas?

[abasu2003]

I';m still having some problems understanding the algorithm.

So for this particular show, I changed the settings such that High Probability is at 5. The frame I stopped it on is the first green frame in the middle of the 4th commercial block. It is getting a score of 50, which i would think is high enough to flag it as a commercial, but its not catching it. I think the explanation will help me better understand whats going on.

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by abbott_m

OK, well after massive upgrades today (Sage 3.0, Webserver, etc) I finally got around to ditching comskip and getting dirmon/showanalyser running. Only thing I can't figure out is how to keep it from detecting shows recorded on the movie channels. I read somewhere that the webserver integration does something along those lines but I saw no change in the webserver pages.

Any ideas?

You have to open up the SA configuration, go to the SageTV tab, then fill in the info for the webserver. Then go to Automatic Profile Selection, and add a profile "DoNotProcess" and then setup the criteria for your movie channels.

[abbott_m]

Originally Posted by stanger89

You have to open up the SA configuration, go to the SageTV tab, then fill in the info for the webserver. Then go to Automatic Profile Selection, and add a profile "DoNotProcess" and then setup the criteria for your movie channels.

OK, figured out how to do that but how is it figuring out what channel something is recorded on? It's still analyzing stuff on a DTV feed which was recorded between channel 500 and 600

Mike

[marneb17]

Originally Posted by marneb17

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 to apologize. You software works perfect. Just amazing. It finds the commercials!!

My problem is that somehow the commercial blocks are displayed wrongly in the timeline in sagetv. I don't know why yet. The frames in the txt file are correct, but SageTV shows the purple "ad-blocks" at the wrong time. I use Cayars 17. So after figuring this out, I tried the standart stv with added comskip but I still get the same problem.
Does anybody know why this could be happening?

EDIT
Ok, i found the problem, it was an NTSC vs. PAL thing. I didn't see that it had to be adjusted in the stv.
EDIT

Marneb

[geogecko]

Wow. Get everything working over the weekend, and now I see a new beta version of sage and new version of SA is available...

Popped in a DVD last night to watch, since my wife suggested it, and thought, cool, she'll like this...oops, no sound. That took about half an hour to figure out...guess I better not mess with things right now.

Anyway, the whole purpose of this post was to say, "thanks, Jere." Tested out SA for the first time on Saturday, and it worked perfectly. I also set up SageMC 16x9 to process commercials while active, and noticed no performance issues when watching TV and processing a recently recorded show...

I think the commercial processing alone was a great step forward for building an HTPC. Thanks a lot man. Good work. Can't wait to upgrade to the newer versions. You'll continue to have my support.

[iceman]

Jere,

I'm running Beta 3.07 with a single Avermedia A180 HDTV card. My video directory has .ts files in it being recorded by Sage. When SA runs against them the CPU goes to 100 percent and stays there indefinetly. The SA status window shows a Currentime of 0, current frame of 0 current FPS 0. Remaining Time "Unknown" Average FPS 0 and in the Edge Profile section is says "Searching".

I can not get SA to detect anything that's been recorded with my A180. Any Ideas?

Thanks
Gerry

[Jere_Jones]

Originally Posted by iceman

My video directory has .ts files in it being recorded by Sage.

SA cannot process .ts files yet. It can only do program streams.

Jere

[SIDENOTE]
Andy, can you move this post and the previous post to the SA thread? OK
[/SIDENOTE]

[iceman]

Jere,

Thanks for response. I guess that explains my problem. These files are being created by Sage because of the my HDTV card I have. Can Comskip handles these ?