ShowAnalyzer's Unknown Future

[peternm22]

I'm still using version 0.9.7 of Showanalyzer. Everything I've seen has indicated that V1 is more trouble then it's worth. I don't know why Jere didn't try to just build in h264 support, instead of doing a complete rewrite. Adding things into V1 like the directory watcher without first making the core functions of Showanalyzer stable and reliable seems like a mistake. Most people who use Showanalyzer were using something like Dirmon or SJQ to launch it.

I'm probably going to be getting the Colossus when it comes out so I'm going to need to upgrade to something with h264 support. Is h264 support on Comskip really that slow? I'm using a AMD Phenom II X4 945 (quad core), would that be fast enough to do live detection on h264?

[Skirge01]

Originally Posted by bialio

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

LOL! While it's still going. Think about that. I don't think we'd be able to skip commercials after the 20 minute mark if we started it after the recording finished.

[Taddeusz]

Just to give a speed comparison with H.264. On my computer, a 2.33Ghz C2D E6550, it took 1hr17min for comskip to go through an hour 720p recording. It took SAV1 about 9min to go through the same recording.

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by PLUCKYHD

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.

FWIW, I finally took the dive and setup SJQ. It was actually a lot easier than expected. And it appears SA is no longer eating memory

[Taddeusz]

Maybe not as a whole. I'll mention it again. I've seen a single showanalyzerengine process using 250MB of memory. Quite a bit more than the 30MB that the old version used while detecting commercials.

[Fuzzy]

true, but I'd imagine it may actually be using a lot of that memory, and that may be a large part of the massive speed improvement it has over anything else out there. I do know the built-in scheduler, though, shouldn't eat up as much as it does - and it really isn't even as versatile as DirMon2 was. I wish he'd just worked on the engine itself, and left the queing to his already quite good DirMon2. It'd be fine this way, if it weren't for the fact that there is no way to monitor the SAEngine if you DON'T use the built-in queue.

[stanger89]

FWIW, I thought the major (speed) difference with SA was that Jere actually licensed decoders (as opposed to using libavcodec like comskip) that could be tweaked to skip unnecessary, computationally costly decoding steps.

[tmiranda]

Originally Posted by davephan

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.

I'd also mention that CommercialDetector also can control which channels are processed. Don't take this as knocking SJQ, I have skin in that Plugin as well and actually spent more time developing the UI for it than CommercialDetector If the only "special" thing you want to do is control which channels get comskiped and which do not, CommercialDetector is easier. If you want to do pre-processing, post-processing or more complicated things, SJQ is better suited.

[Brent]

Originally Posted by tmiranda

I'd also mention that CommercialDetector also can control which channels are processed. Don't take this as knocking SJQ, I have skin in that Plugin as well and actually spent more time developing the UI for it than CommercialDetector If the only "special" thing you want to do is control which channels get comskiped and which do not, CommercialDetector is easier. If you want to do pre-processing, post-processing or more complicated things, SJQ is better suited.

I second that. CommercialDetector is easy to set up, easy to use, and just works. It doesn't do all the fancy stuff but many don't need that fancy stuff anyway. Great option for many.

[rochurch]

I am watching sporting events much closer to the time they start. This is because of this day of twitter and facebook updates everybody has to comment on games in progress.
I recently upgraded my system hardware because it was time. I went for the quad core, but I am really not seeing a big speed performance in comskip - which I regretfully switched to for h.264 support. I could never get stability on the sav1 version and the directory monitoring. I think someone figured out how to get the executible to work out of there. I need to search for that.
I know comskip monitor has advanced features to work with showanalizer. Anybody have this working with a new version of SA that does HD-PVR files? If so could you post directions / steps taken?

[Taddeusz]

I use SJQ and have it run showanalyzerengine.exe directly every time. Works out well. Still not very stable though. I get about 1 out of every 10 recordings that fail to complete.

[stanger89]

Do you do anything special parameter wise to get that to work? I thought I tried that once and it didn't work.

[Taddeusz]

The only parameter I use is to specify the profile. It works fine with the only caveat being that you can't monitor it's progress and it won't show up in the UI until it's completed.

[stanger89]

But can SJQ monitor the progress? I ask because the way I've got it set up now I'm calling SA.exe, which works fine, but it simply puts the request in SA's queue and returns immediately, which works fine for one client.

However I've been thinking that with SJQ I could actually install a client on a couple machines and distribute the SA work, but this would require that SJQ be aware of when stuff is running, and when it actually finishes.

[Taddeusz]

Originally Posted by stanger89

But can SJQ monitor the progress? I ask because the way I've got it set up now I'm calling SA.exe, which works fine, but it simply puts the request in SA's queue and returns immediately, which works fine for one client.

However I've been thinking that with SJQ I could actually install a client on a couple machines and distribute the SA work, but this would require that SJQ be aware of when stuff is running, and when it actually finishes.

Yes, if you run it by executing showanalyzerengine.exe. I had the same problem when I was first setting up SJQ. Items run this way stay in SJQ's queue until they are completed.

[Polypro]

I own both SA and CS. SAV1 was/is a nightmare. I had it running on a WHS machine (0.97 ran great on it) and had to hard reset numerous times...I'm amazed I didn't corrupt the installation of WHS. Detection also was lacking. I went PM city with Spockers and Toricred and tweaked everything...including downloading a database viewer to get black frame numbers...crazy. With CS you change one number to a 43 or a 47...done...and 99.8% perfect. No crashes. CS *is* slower...but that hasn't bothered me. Jere is a Sage guy (and carries the banner on those two 7MC fanboy podcasts )...when SAV is as good and reliable (Schoolhouse!) as CS, I'll be switching back. Jere's our guy.

P

OT: Can SJQ or Commercial Detector be run on my Sage server/client box...and kick off Comskip on my WHS box?

[tmiranda]

Originally Posted by Polypro

OT: Can SJQ or Commercial Detector be run on my Sage server/client box...and kick off Comskip on my WHS box?

CommercialDetector will work on Windows (including WHS) or Linux, but will only run on the Sage server (no distributed processing). SJQ will run on the same platforms and can be setup to do distributed processing. So if you want to launch comskip on the WHS box from a server/client you will need SJQ.

[Olias]

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.

We've watched NFL games "almost" live for the whole season using CS and for us the commercials are marked within a couple of minutes of them being recorded. I'll start watching a noon game at about 1:00 and be able to pop through the commercials and half-time show. Buy the end of the game I'm pretty much caught up and never have to sit through a commercial. I'm using an older AMD Q6700 in the Sage server.

BTW, this drives my wife bonkers. She can't stand to watch sports if it's not in real time. Something about the social aspect of experiencing the event along with millions of other people at nearly the same time
...and because of the occasional call she gets from a relative who happens to be watching on old fashioned "live" TV to comment on a play we haven't seen yet. But since we installed the Infopop/CallerID plugin we just don't answer those calls during the game.

[Taddeusz]

Originally Posted by Olias

We've watched NFL games "almost" live for the whole season using CS and for us the commercials are marked within a couple of minutes of them being recorded. I'll start watching a noon game at about 1:00 and be able to pop through the commercials and half-time show. Buy the end of the game I'm pretty much caught up and never have to sit through a commercial. I'm using an older AMD Q6700 in the Sage server.

BTW, this drives my wife bonkers. She can't stand to watch sports if it's not in real time. Something about the social aspect of experiencing the event along with millions of other people at nearly the same time
...and because of the occasional call she gets from a relative who happens to be watching on old fashioned "live" TV to comment on a play we haven't seen yet. But since we installed the Infopop/CallerID plugin we just don't answer those calls during the game.

What tuner are you recording from though? That makes a big difference in the speed of detection. If it's OTA or QAM MPEG2 is easy to decode. H.264 from HDPVR recordings are more computationally intensive to decode.

[Skirge01]

Originally Posted by Taddeusz

What tuner are you recording from though? That makes a big difference in the speed of detection. If it's OTA or QAM MPEG2 is easy to decode. H.264 from HDPVR recordings are more computationally intensive to decode.

Well said. Yes, if I watch an OTA program recorded by one of my HDHR tuners, I can definitely get "real time" comskipping. It's the HD-PVR's recording which require us to wait a little while.