Recording and deleting commercials

[bighick]

My plan is to have somwhere between 2 and 4 atsc tuners ( i am in the USA) on my home server. I would like to set up my recordings and automatically delete commercials and record to like a x264 format or something not to big. Is this possible?

The reason i am looking is because I tried windows media center and its recordings were just huge, 3+ GBS and am looking for something closer to about 1-1.5 GB for a 1hour tv show and commercials deleted automatically. I just want to log in to the server and move them to the correct folder the next day.

[GKusnick]

ATSC tuners record in whatever format the broadcaster transmits in. They don't re-encode on the fly. Typical file sizes for broadcast HDTV are around 6-8 GB/hour.

There are tools for re-encoding files after they've been recorded, but that's fairly CPU-intensive. Also I'd imagine that compressing down to 1.5 GB/hour will degrade the quality pretty substantially. It's doable, but you might not be happy with the results.

[stanger89]

IMO the commercial detection options are not accurate enough to trust them for automatically removing commercials.

[bits]

I completely agree with the comments made by GKusnick and stranger89.

I have been cutting commercials for 6+ years and can confidently say that there is no commercial detection software that is 100% correct 100% of the time. Especially when applied to a wide variety of show types, channels, sources ect... The best you can hope for would be around 70-75% on average. A good portion of the errors will be commercials parts being left in the video but there will still be plenty of instances where parts of the video will be missing. The situation gets even more difficult and inaccurate when using padding combined with back to back recordings. IMO it is a very good idea to use padding.

My own preference and rule of thumb regarding re-encoding is to not do it unless there is no other way. Re-encoding always results in PQ loss, can introduce artifacts and the process is not reversible. However, re-encoded video if done correctly can still be quite watchable but is heavily dependent upon the codec, the settings, the encoder and most of all the quality of the source material.

Who wouldn't want to be able to record in any format commercial free at fraction of the original file size.

[wrems]

Hard drives are cheap, buy a bigger one and don't worry about all the added complexity of removing the commercials.

[matt91]

I agree with the comment above - get a larger hard drive, and you'll be better off. Even though you will have spent $100, you won't have experienced the hassles of trying to get the commercial cutting to run correctly. Plus, they are very CPU intensive, so you'll have that constant strain on the computer.

[freedml]

There are two 'commercial skip' applications and they both work this way: They create files which tell the SageTV 'player' where the commercials are. Then the player 'plugin' shows them on the time-bar and skips them by default. This is useful because then, if the application has been fooled or there is a glitch in recording quality, you can 'skip' back to the beginning of the false 'commercial break' and watch that part.


My experience (with OTA tuners in a fringe area) is that it works great with some channels and shows and less well with others. There are a ton of 'settings' you can tweak, and I increased the 'padding' option so that it usually plays the first bit and last bits of the commercial break so we're sure we watched the whole show. It's a little complicated to set up but well worth it to me.