My Comskip on a WHS with HDPVR Experience

[dislecksea]

I just wanted to give a quick report to anyone who is thinking about implementing Comskip for an HDPVR installation. My WHS CPU is a Intel Core 2 Quad Q6700 (K) (2.66GHz) and I have 2 HDPVRs running on it. The WHS serves 2 HD 100 Extenders.

I always wanted commercial detection on my setup but was hesitant to implement it until I was comfortable it would work on my setup. No sense in messing with it only to have the WAF drop because it was too slow or something. Well, I now have Sage Job Queue running multiple instances of Comskip simultaneously whenever a new Scheduled Recording is finished recording.

First off, Comskip is very easy to install and worked pretty well out of the box. Not perfect, but pretty well. I figure that I am going to need to do some tweaking and I find the Comskip tweaking document kind of confusing so you may see some posts asking for clarification over here later.

Second, I went with SJQ instead of Comskip Monitor because I didn't want to have the server analyzing all of the Suggested Recordings that I will probably never watch. But installing SJQ did take a bit of work - just follow the directions and you should be fine. FYI - I am no programmer and I still managed to muck my way through it.

Third, as for performance. Basically, each instance of Comskip uses roughly 25% of the CPU. I have run 3 of them at once and it never went over using 80% and hovered around 75%. Each file seems to process in just a little under real-time - 1 hour shows in about 45 min, 30 min shows in about 20 min. That is plenty fast enough for me because it is rare that I jump up and watch a show as soon as it has been recorded. Oh, I am obviously running the donator's version of Comskip, otherwise it wouldn't be able to handle the HDPVR files.

Anyway, I just wanted to send out a big old thank you to the folks responsible for those two very impressive pieces of software and I wanted to let all of the non-programmer types out there know that it indeed can be done.