ShowAnalyzer's Unknown Future

[Taddeusz]

For those that care apparently Spockers, who has been moderating Jere's ShowAnalyzer forum, has given up the ghost and given an official shove off. Apparently Jere hasn't contacted him for months. A fact that he's been hiding for quite some time.

I realize that Jere is a military man and may actually be on deployment. However, speaking from experience just because you're on deployment doesn't mean you are detached from the world. I always had some form of communication unless we were under a blackout right before a major operation.

This is kind of sad. ShowAnalyzer to me is far more functional than comskip. Especially in the speed department where H.264 decoding is concerned SA comes out about 3 times faster.

Jere is obviously a skilled programmer. If he's going to drop the project. So be it. But at least make a public statement. It's cruel leaving your customers and other people who directly depend on you out to dry.

I'm really saddened by this turn of events. Part of me hopes that Jere might sell SA to someone else who has more time and interest to put into development. But I also realize that with the relatively free comskip SA becomes a small niche of an already small niche.

Here's hoping for the future of SA, or at least some closure.

[gplasky]

Unfortunately this is not the first time that jere has gone silent either. I own ShowAnalyzer and was always impressed by its speed. But not so much by the support. Today I use Comskip with DirMon2 (another program by Jere) and comskip every night for watching the next day. I have more than enough recordings to watch so that this is not an issue. It has been because of these silent dropouts I have stayed with Comskip. Which for me is as good and can be tweaked to detect better than ShowAnalyzer. (for me.) It just isn't as quick as h.264. It will be very sad if this is the way it ends.

Gerry

[matt91]

Jere actually got out of the Navy a couple of years ago, IIRC.

[stanger89]

I may have to give comskip another try. SA's detection actually works better for me, last time I ran comskip it had trouble with it crashing, I think on my OTA recordings oddly enough. Unfortunately SA has a problem with a runaway memory leak in it's directory scanner for me so after a day or two it just stops finding new files.

[PLUCKYHD]

Originally Posted by stanger89

I may have to give comskip another try. SA's detection actually works better for me, last time I ran comskip it had trouble with it crashing, I think on my OTA recordings oddly enough. Unfortunately SA has a problem with a runaway memory leak in it's directory scanner for me so after a day or two it just stops finding new files.

I saw this too with the new build. I would recommend using something besides his ShowAnalyzer studio or whatever he calls it to do the monitoring.

[Taddeusz]

Yea, I don't use the SA's monitor. I use SJQ for mine. I've actually had relatively poor results with SAV1. The old SA does really well except on CBS. I'm considering going back to comskip for my HDPVR recordings but SAV1 is just so much faster.

[jorton]

I've been using Commercial Detector for monitoring with SA option to set it as the engine (instead of Comskip) and have never had any issues, best setup for marking I have had in years. Never even had to tweak it just works. Marks them live and fast. I'm all HDPVRs.

J

[Taddeusz]

SJQ is nice because I can set rules for different channels and start SA and SAV1 with different profiles. Also, before SA runs I can put my HDHR recordings through VideoRedo to iron out any major errors.

The other thing I don't like about comskip, and SAV1 for that matter, is how difficult they are to tweak. I love the old SA's Schoolhouse where you can visually drill down and tweak the settings. I just can't do that with the other two.

Other than Jere's long disappearances the only other thing that kind of annoys me about ShowAnalyzer is how he seems to have dropped, at least outwardly, all the work he'd previously done. It appears to be a complete rewrite since all the metrics are different than pre-v1. Granted, I don't know all the technical details but from my perspective pre-v1 SA worked well, very well actually. To me SAV1 was more of a step backward. It complicated things more than it made things better and took away a huge feature (Schoolhouse) that made it stand out from comskip.

[Bagal]

I don't use ShowAnalyzer but I do listen to the HTPC Centric podcast which Jere appears on and he's mentioned on there that he's working on the next version of ShowAnalyzer.

It's also been mentioned on the podcast that it's difficult to get hold of Jere, he's attributed that to being deep in code...

[Taddeusz]

But so deep on coding that he can't bother to contact his moderator?

[gplasky]

Originally Posted by Bagal

I don't use ShowAnalyzer but I do listen to the HTPC Centric podcast which Jere appears on and he's mentioned on there that he's working on the next version of ShowAnalyzer.

It's also been mentioned on the podcast that it's difficult to get hold of Jere, he's attributed that to being deep in code...

Wasn't that podcast over 2 months ago? Kind of a long time not to respond to someone who is moderating his forum for him.

Gerry

[Bagal]

The podcast where he mentions he's working on the next version was a couple of months ago but the last HTPC Centric with him was on the 29th December.

I'm not trying to make excuses for the guy, I agree with the sentiment in this post that he shouldn't be ignoring his users, especially when it's a paid for product, I was just trying to show that he is still around and apparently working on ShowAnalyzer even if he is ignoring everybody, which isn't really the way to run a business...

[davephan]

Originally Posted by gplasky

Unfortunately this is not the first time that jere has gone silent either. I own ShowAnalyzer and was always impressed by its speed. But not so much by the support. Today I use Comskip with DirMon2 (another program by Jere) and comskip every night for watching the next day. I have more than enough recordings to watch so that this is not an issue. It has been because of these silent dropouts I have stayed with Comskip. Which for me is as good and can be tweaked to detect better than ShowAnalyzer. (for me.) It just isn't as quick as h.264. It will be very sad if this is the way it ends.

Gerry

Too bad good applications sometimes dye out. One-man operations sometimes come to that end. I still remember Cayars improvements to SageTV. Cayars just dropped out of SageTV, I hope he is OK.

You just have to move along to the next viable supported way of processing commercial content, which is Comskip. You can speed up things by throwing more faster hardware at it with a fast quad-core in your SageTV computer or a second fast quad-core computer just for the Comskip processing.

I also used ShowAnalyzer, but when the new version came out, I think it was version 1, it did not work for me. I switched back to Comskip. I also used DirMon2, which worked great, but the computer was processing non-commercial channels through Comskip, wasting resources and sometimes marking commercials where there were no commercials in the non-commercial channels.

Sage Job Queue is a much better solution for running Comskip. You can control which channels are processed. So only commercial channels are processed. I am not using the new SJQ version yet, but plan to upgrade soon. SQJ does have a 'learning curve' to get it configured right, but it is well worth the effort.

Dave

[Taddeusz]

Just found Jere on Twitter. He hasn't posted an update since Oct 7.

Apparently he's been working on Android apps.

[Brent]

Jere's still around but as mentioned above, he tends to bury himself in coding for long periods of time. Could moving back to an older version help for the meantime?

I personally use Comskip as it's been very reliable to me.

[Taddeusz]

I started tweaking comskip for my HDPVR recordings yesterday. Hopefully I can get it working better than SAV1. It's still so slow in comparison though. But at least it has H.264 support.

I noticed this morning that dragonglobal.biz seems to have melted down.

[Brent]

Jere's update on his forum:

I am alive. I am working on ShowAnalyzer, although not full time. I haven't provided updates because there has been no worthy progress. It seems I have coded myself into a corner, so to speak. The infrastructure that I thought so brilliant at the beginning has been an extremely limiting factor and the cause of endless bugs. When I fix one bug, four more points of instability pop up. The protection software that cost thousands of dollars seems to only add to ShowAnalyzer's instability and cause an endless number of false positives from anti-virus software.

With all that in mind, I'm going to put up a couple of polls that I would appreciate your participation in.

Also, in light of losing Spocker's support, which I deeply regret, I'm removing the one year upgrade policy. Anyone who has ever bought ShowAnalyzer will get lifetime upgrades. After all, it seems kinda silly now, doesn't it.

Sincerely,
Jere

I understand the forum admin throwing in the towel, but I personally think Jere deserves a little more patience overall from us. There is always Comskip if SA isn't working but I expect Jere will get it worked out. I love Comskip, but knowing Jere is a loyal SageTV guy makes him that much more valuable to the SageTV community. Lets try to give him our support.

[Skirge01]

Originally Posted by Taddeusz

I started tweaking comskip for my HDPVR recordings yesterday. Hopefully I can get it working better than SAV1. It's still so slow in comparison though. But at least it has H.264 support.

I noticed this morning that dragonglobal.biz seems to have melted down.

If you watch a lot of live TV, I can definitely see the speed of comskip being an issue. I run comskip on a 2.3GHz Xeon and we have to wait about 20 minutes before watching an hour-long show, if we want to avoid any commercials. We just don't watch live TV very much, so it doesn't bother us.

[Taddeusz]

Speed isn't a huge deal for my family. The way I have SJQ set up is that it only does detection between midnight and 3pm. The reason I have it do that is because I've had issues with jumpy playback if I have it running concurrently.

Other than that. If there's one reason to move away from SAV1 that would be memory usage. I've seen my SAV1 processes use around 250mb. Pre-v1 used around 30mb. Seems it may be .NET which may be causing that.

[bialio]

Originally Posted by Skirge01

If you watch a lot of live TV, I can definitely see the speed of comskip being an issue. I run comskip on a 2.3GHz Xeon and we have to wait about 20 minutes before watching an hour-long show, if we want to avoid any commercials. We just don't watch live TV very much, so it doesn't bother us.

Do you start the comskip when the recording finishes or while it's still going?