Want to start skipping commercials

[MickBurke]

I have used sage for about 14 years now, but have never looked into commercial skipping. I usually watch on my third monitor on my PC and it's easy enough to just pop through them...

At this point I'm considering it for a number of reasons, but don't really know anything about the concept other than the literal.

So my questions are: Does a commercial skipper skip RECORDING the commercials, or does it just skip over them on play back? What is the most effective and accurate commercial skipper for sage? If it goes wrong and skips a part that shouldn't be, is that easily correctable?

The other reason I never bothered looking into it was the idea of f it doesn't work 100% it may not even be worth the hassle, but at this point I figured I'd at least look into it.

Much appreciation for any suggestions info or recommendations!

Mick

[KryptoNyte]

Mick,

You're looking for a SageTV version 9 plugin called "Commercial Detector" by tmiranda (installs and enables a commercial detecting executable in SageTV called comskip). There is an option to use "Commercial Analyzer" or something like that, but I think you'll want to use comskip to do the heavy lifting.

SageTV still records the entire program, but with "comskip" enabled, it will attempt to skip over commercials during viewing of the program.

In the timeline while watching a program, you'll see some dark areas that weren't there before = commercials.

You can attempt to enable it to run on live TV also, which will of course have some delay in finding commercials. There are many more options to play with in the plugin settings. Some folks have issues with live TV comskip and have needed to disable this option to get stability, but I would think most folks use it with varied success.

The comskip software sometimes finds commercials very effectively with default settings, sometimes it doesn't work so well, and may need some tuning if you're up for it. Most of the time I've found it works pretty well if there is a station logo in corner of the screen during a program.

You can disable/enable comskip at any time while watching a program.

If all of your TV programming is mpeg2, then I think that you can use the plugin right out of the box, but if you have h.264 content, then let us know so we can give you further instructions.

[KryptoNyte]

You'll have to forgive the spelling mistakes of our local news folks.

[KryptoNyte]

Oh, and for those times when comskip nails all the commercials just right, welcome to SageTV heaven, brother.

[wnjj]

I used comskip for kids shows when they were too little to skip their own but haven't bothered with it lately since I never automated it. It's great in that it simply makes a text file named the same as the media but with an .edl extension. The lines are simply pairs of numbers that are the start and stop of each commercial in milliseconds so for shows you (or kids) plan to playback a lot, you can hand edit if needed to make them what you need.

During playback you can skip into the commercial sections so nothing is lost if it misses.

[MickBurke]

Thanks everybody! I'll give it all a try in a week when I'm done recording this amazing Mythbusters mega marathon!!

[KryptoNyte]

Oh man, Mythbuster's marathon is a prime opportunity for this - don't wait!

[MickBurke]

Don't need to restart or anything?
I just figured I'd wait so as not to disrupt it...?

[tmiranda]

Originally Posted by MickBurke

Don't need to restart or anything?
I just figured I'd wait so as not to disrupt it...?

If you are installing CommercialDetector for the first time it will not require a restart.

If you are using the default STV, go to the Plugin Manager, select "UI Mod" from the top, and then CommercialDetector UI. It will install everything you need and it should "just work" out of the box.

[MickBurke]

Just to be safe I waited, and am going to get on this now. One follow up question, if you use the 'convert' option built into sage, will it convert without the commercials?

Thanks again!

[MickBurke]

I see now why you said to install before recording that marathon, running the scan on all files looks to be a HEAVY process!!

In any event, it's running now, and one of the shows had a 'previously on...' that it marked as commercial. How do I override that? If I just use the mouse to go back, it jumps forward again.

Also, It's not showing up on my HD200 and HD300's. Do I need to do something additional on them? I installed the plugin on the server, adn the client plugin on the sage client on my PC, but I though the 200 and 300 got everything including the interface directly form the server?

Thanks again for all the help everyone!

[KarylFStein]

Originally Posted by MickBurke

I see now why you said to install before recording that marathon, running the scan on all files looks to be a HEAVY process!!

In any event, it's running now, and one of the shows had a 'previously on...' that it marked as commercial. How do I override that? If I just use the mouse to go back, it jumps forward again.

Also, It's not showing up on my HD200 and HD300's. Do I need to do something additional on them? I installed the plugin on the server, adn the client plugin on the sage client on my PC, but I though the 200 and 300 got everything including the interface directly form the server?

Thanks again for all the help everyone!

There is a setting that tells comskip to ignore the first X seconds and/or last Y seconds of a file so it won't skip the "previously on" and "next on" bits. I think you have to edit the comskip.ini file though. There is also a setting I think in the SageUI that says to ignore skipping for X seconds after you manually skip. You can also tell Sage to not automatically skip commercials during playback. This means you'll have to press a button when commercials start to skip to the end, though. You can selectively turn that on during playback by bringing up the options and disabling automatic skip.