Plugin: CommercialDetector

[tmiranda]

Originally Posted by phantomfsoc

Seriously though don't kill yourself trying to add that feature in (but if you have the time please do)

Don't worry, I have no intention of committing "suicide by Sage". There was something else I wanted to add to CommercialDetector so maybe this is the excuse to do it. Unfortunately I can't remember what the other enhancement was! (Crap, getting old and fogetting everything is the pits.)

I had pretty much stopped writing and updating Sage plugins because I thought I'd be wasting my time on a dead product. Now that I've looked at about every other option I could think of I've determined there is still nothing that serves me better than Sage so I may as well continue to invest time and effort into it.

[hb4]

I've searched this thread and read the Wiki, but cannot figure out what the check box for each queued item under "Select the new value for Show Jobs that are Queued" is supposed to do. So that's my question. Thanks!

[tmiranda]

Originally Posted by hb4

I've searched this thread and read the Wiki, but cannot figure out what the check box for each queued item under "Select the new value for Show Jobs that are Queued" is supposed to do. So that's my question. Thanks!

The message is cryptic due to how the core implements the plugin menus. The check box does nothing, the only reason it's there is because it would be difficult to remove it.

[hb4]

Originally Posted by tmiranda

The message is cryptic due to how the core implements the plugin menus. The check box does nothing, the only reason it's there is because it would be difficult to remove it.

OK, thanks. I'm not losing my mind, then. A relief.

In the process of trying out the Plugin.

Thanks for your work on helping make Sage the best out there.

[sacrament055]

tmiranda, Any chance if you're making changes you can add an option for a 10 minute delay to conskip? I would think that's enough time for programs that I was watching live to disappear before commercial detector tries to run comskip on things I don't intend to keep.


Thanks

[tmiranda]

Originally Posted by sacrament055

tmiranda, Any chance if you're making changes you can add an option for a 10 minute delay to conskip? I would think that's enough time for programs that I was watching live to disappear before commercial detector tries to run comskip on things I don't intend to keep.

It's possible. I started the coding but it's in the very early stages. My issue right now is time and testing. Real life is very busy at the moment and my test machine is currently down.

[waynedunham]

One thing I have wished for many times in the past is a way to re-order the queue of recordings waiting to be Comskipped.

Many times I have multiple 1/2 hour recordings that are sitting waiting while Comskip is working on a long recording (movie, sports) that won't finish for a long time.

If I could re-order the Queue then I could just stop the comskip on that long recording and have all the new ones get comskipped in the order I want them to. (yes, I sometimes have too many things recording, but 7 tuners will do that. )

I currently have it doing 2 comskips at most. Any more and it either drags the CPU down too much or I have to cut CPU to each comskip thread to the point where it won't keep up with a recording and everything gets backlogged. So it would also be great if we could select a single current comskip (or multiple for those running more than 2 comskip ops) to kill.

I've been mostly a lurker in this thread, but do want to say a hearty thanks for all the work you have done on this plugin.

[cyberlewis]

I've recently made 2 observations within my current Commercial Detector/UI setup that I can totally live with, but thought I would bring up here in case there's something that I need to understand or that can be changed in the plugins themselves.

1. According to the release notes for version 1.31 of the Commercial Detector UI plugin, the plugin should display the CS header icon whenever there are active commercial detector jobs in the queue, even if the CS icon is the only header icon presented at the time. For me, this only occurs when another header icon is present. I have confirmed this by executing 'Run Comskip' on a recording, ensuring that the job is displayed as processing in Commercial Detector settings, and then playing around with starting imported media scans to trigger the 'Media Scan' header icon; when the 'Media Scan' header icon displays, so does the CS header icon, and as soon as the media scan completes, both icons disappear from the header, even though the Commercial Detector job is still processing.

2. I use Slugger's SRE plugin along with Tom's SRE UI and love it. I have noticed however, that, while recording a monitored event, when the 2nd recording file is created for a monitored event that is going past the regularly-scheduled end time, that the associated Commercial Detector job for this 2nd recording file goes into the queue and does not actively process until the recording is complete (I have Live TV enabled in the Commercial Detector settings). I have max number of Commercial Detector jobs set at 2, but this happens when I only have the monitored event recording, so I would expect that Commercial Detector would show 2 processing jobs, one for the first file from the monitored recording (until it finishes) as well as the 2nd recording file as it is being recorded. Make sense?

Just wanted to report these observations to the community...I love my Commercial Detecor and Sage!

Brian

[tmiranda]

Brian,

My plan is to add a few enhancements to CommercialDetector after I finish up the Thumbnail Navigator. To address your comments:

I know how to fix #1 and would have done so sooner if I realized this was an issue.

I'll need to look into #2. First I'm wondering why a second recording is started when SRE extends a recording, this should not happen. Having said that the issue may be related to how Sage handles recordings that are broken up into multiple segments (files). When Sage starts a recording a specific event is sent that I can watch for and start CommercialDetector. I suspect that when the second segment is started the event is not triggered so CommercialDetector does not know it needs to start a new comskip job. I'll need to look into this to confirm.

[cyberlewis]

Hi Tom,

That's very cool that you are looking at some Commercial Detector improvements. I apologize for creating confusion with my attempt to describe the SRE issue; you have it right, my terminology was bad as I should have referred to it as the 2nd segment rather than a 2nd recording file. That being said, your description of the problem I am seeing is spot on.

Thanks,
Brian

[geogecko]

What version of ComSkip is installed with the plug-in currently? Would it be beneficial to install the latest version, and point CD to it, or is CD updated enough with the latest version of ComSkip?

I'm getting ready to get this setup. After having a box setup for a long time on SageTV v6 and SageMC, and using DirMon2 and SA for commercial detection (which I could never get reliable, so finally ditched commercial detection all together), I'm ready for an easier option with my new install of v7.

Thanks for your hard work on this. I know that Commercial Detection has been something that a lot of people wanted, but it was usually difficult to setup, and get working correctly. Sounds like it is finally plug and play for the most part.

[tmiranda]

It comes with 80.041. I personally don't see a reason to use a later version but you can check the changelog to see if it makes sense for you: http://www.kaashoek.com/files/readme.txt

There are a few .ini settings you must change if you use your own comskip install. Scan this thread for the list.

[geogecko]

Ok, I will probably pass on that.

I just have to figure out why comskip seems to totally jack up my server. I have an older dual core AMD computer it's running on, which I believe is a 5600K socket 939 processor with 6GB of RAM.

I only allow 1 instance of CS to run at a time, and since my recordings exist on a NAS, and not the server, I just turned on the "slow down" feature, to see if that helps with responsiveness of that computer. I thought processing that over the network might be choking it or something.

[geogecko]

Originally Posted by tmiranda

The number of milliseconds comskip pauses after each frame can be changed in the .ini file, it just happens to default to 10ms.

Where is this setting? I can't find it in the comskip.ini file.

I'm wanting to reduce it, as I am between a bogged down system with playnice disabled, but hardly doing anything with it at 10ms, so I want to play with the time a bit, and find a good compromise.

[Fuzzy]

What version of comskip are you running? I think newer versions run with a lower IO priority, so it doesn't bog down the system, but doesn't have to actively pause. It lets windows handle the throttling. If that isn't the case, I, at some point, made a launcher for comskip that launches it at low priority that I could probably dig up.

[tmiranda]

Originally Posted by geogecko

Where is this setting? I can't find it in the comskip.ini file.

I'm wanting to reduce it, as I am between a bogged down system with playnice disabled, but hardly doing anything with it at 10ms, so I want to play with the time a bit, and find a good compromise.

Look here under "Reducing CPU load": http://www.kaashoek.com/files/tuning.htm

[geogecko]

Thanks for the response, Fuzzy. According to tmiranda, it's version 80.041. I think the issue is with disk IO, since I'm running over the network. The CPU does not seem to be pegged, so I guess I should check out the bandwidth of the ethernet. When I enabled the CD setting "Run More Slowly," this seemed to fix my machine from becoming unresponsive, however, now it is totally responsive, but also takes forever to process the commercials.

I want to try and play with the delay, and see if I can find a better match for my system.

I could have sworn that I searched the comskip.ini file for "play" and didn't get any matches, but perhaps I was only searching sage.properties, I can't remember. So if it is not in the ini file, do I just add those "play_nice" properties, and make a new ini file?

Is the best place to store a custom ini file within the base sagetv/sagetv/ folder? Thanks for all the help!

[tmiranda]

If the property is not in the .ini you can just add it. I would just edit the .ini file that comes with CommercialDetector rather than make a new one. Let me know how it goes.

[geogecko]

I thought that was a no, no, for uninstallation purposes...

I will let you all know how it works out for me. I tried processing a file last night, and it was moving slower than real-time. Maybe about 0.85x or so. I'll drop it down to 5ms, and see how that works.

[Fuzzy]

Originally Posted by geogecko

I thought that was a no, no, for uninstallation purposes...

I will let you all know how it works out for me. I tried processing a file last night, and it was moving slower than real-time. Maybe about 0.85x or so. I'll drop it down to 5ms, and see how that works.

What processor do you have, and what is the source of the recordings?