Comskip on ESPN . . . .

[JeffDerek]

I have comskip installed with DirMon2 right now. The only change I made to comskip.ini was to set it to also process live tv. I've made absolutely no changes to the logo detection or anything else like that.

Comskip works perfectly on all network programming, it picks up the commercials just fine. However, it seems to have a problem with the ESPN ticker. Sometimes the ticker goes away during the commercials, and sometimes it doesn't. Comskip is identifying only the times that the ticker is gone as commercials, which means that there are entire commercial breaks that are identified as actual programming.

I looked through comskip.ini and several other places, and couldn't find anything that seemed like the right change to make to improve this. I saw that I could use SJQ instead of DirMon2 to run different configurations of comskip for different channels, but for that to be truly helpful I still need to find a configuration that correctly identifies commercials on ESPN to begin with.

I appreciate any suggestions you may have.

J

[JeffDerek]

Does anyone have a suggestion?

[JeffDerek]

If there are no suggestions here, does anyone know where else I might find some help?

[matt91]

I haven't tinkered with my comskip settings in at least 2 years, but can't you modify the area of the image that comskip scans? That is, maybe you can exclude the top (bottom?) of the image so that the presence or absence of the ticker doesn't affect commercial detection.

if that does work, i would think that you'd want to use that setting for just ESPN, which I think would lead you toward SJQ. I imagine that this setting would be counter-productive on other channels.

[JeffDerek]

Originally Posted by matt91

I haven't tinkered with my comskip settings in at least 2 years, but can't you modify the area of the image that comskip scans? That is, maybe you can exclude the top (bottom?) of the image so that the presence or absence of the ticker doesn't affect commercial detection.

if that does work, i would think that you'd want to use that setting for just ESPN, which I think would lead you toward SJQ. I imagine that this setting would be counter-productive on other channels.

That's exactly what I would expect I want to do, but looking at the comskip settings, I can't figure out how to do that

[matt91]

did you look through this? seems there might be something useful in here:

http://www.kaashoek.com/files/tuning.htm

[JeffDerek]

I looked through there but didn't see anything that looked like it would do what I want. Is there a setting you see that I missed?

J

[aflat]

Try adjusting this setting

ticker_tape=0 ; Amount of pixels from bottom to ignore in all processing

[JeffDerek]

You're awesome. No idea how I missed something so simple. I swear I read that thing a good 4 times, and missed that each time. I saw the "border" thing but it didn't appear to work.

Sorry for the incompetence

J

[ewelin]

JeffDerek,

If you figure it out could you post your solution. I record sportcenter every morning and have been curious about this as well. Would be nice to get the commercials skipped properly.

[JeffDerek]

I changed ticker_tape=0 to ticker_tape=50, and it worked on Pardon the Interruption. I've currently got it analyzing this morning's Mike and Mike in the Morning.

I haven't yet watched much other TV to see if this negatively affects anything else, so no promises, but so far I'm feeling pretty good about it

J