ComSkip - What am I doing wrong?

[K O]

(Preface) Long time stalker, first time poster. I referenced a lot of posts on this forum to help me setup, so thanks to everyone for already asking and answering all the questions I had - especially Gerry, who seemed to have already answered questions to everything I needed.

I've recently started using SageTV along with a new Windows Home Server, 7TB of storage, and an HD200 extender as the sole client. I'm using Sage MC as my interface, and for now am recording TV with an HD Homerun until I can get a couple R5000's setup. The setup works flawlessly for me, and the wife is pleased with the way it works, aside from ComSkip not marking any commercials correctly.

I setup ComSkip using DirMon2 and it runs properly and even runs while shows are still recording, but I'm somewhat confused because it never correctly marks the start and stop of commercials. In fact, what's causing me to post this is that during a football game this weekend (3.5 hour recording), only about 2.5 hours were recorded, but on the interface, it showed that ComSkip had already marked out commercials all the way through the end of the show. That's when I knew something was definitely wrong.

What would make ComSkip be off all the time, and why is it marking commercials for parts of the show that haven't even recorded yet?

Are my expectations for ComSkip too high, or have I messed something up? All my recordings are high quality MPEG-2 from the HD Homerun setup as a QAM tuner for local HD channels.

[stanger89]

Well one thing to do is make sure it's configured to make edl files and not txt ones. edl files have the start and stop times, where as the txt files have start and stop frames, and it's less accurate to have the frames because the framerate is not always constant and the STV has to calculate the times to tell Sage where to mark/skip.

[K O]

I see it's outputting .txt files into the recording directory despite having the following lines in my comskip.ini file:

output_default=0
output_edl=1

I just did some researching on this and found this thread: http://forums.sage.tv/forums/showthread.php?t=28634 which lead me to add --ini="c:\Comskip\comskip.ini" as a commandline opton in DirMon2.

I deleted all the .txt files and am letting it run again through my recordings. Will check it tonight and report back if that fixed it. Thanks!



::: UPDATE :::
It's outputting .edl files now! Hopefully this is a sign that we're moving in the right direction.

[K O]

Amazing! ComSkip works brilliantly now. Thanks!