Bug with comskip autoskip?

[ldavis]

I am having a problem with autoskip at the beginning/ending of shows where sometimes I have very short (1 or 2 sec) commercial breaks. The size of the breaks may be a problem with comskip but autoskip's response is also a problem. Basically, autoskip will go into an endless do loop and just keep repeating the short segment over and over until I forward out of the loop. Even that is hard to do. Is anyone else having a similar problem? I'll try to treak comskip to avoid these small breaks but the STVi shouldn't do this should it?

[DFA]

Interesting. Not something you would expect to find or even check for. Bad detection caused you to stumble on to it.

As my luck would have it, the wife would tumble into it while I was not around leading to the usual round of bad press (Tivo / STB PVR threats).

DFA

[hchucky]

I have seen the same issue. Guess I hadn't given it too much thought but now that you mention it I too believe it is comskip related.

HC

[farfromuman]

Same here, it is a bit annoying especially when using the Placeshifter.

[JUC]

same here. Endless loop usually during the first 8-9 seconds of the recording. It is very hard to even FF ahead of the problem. I usually just hit options when it happens and disable commskip until it gets past that part, then reenable it. It does not always happen--but as the OP mentioned-usually when the first segment is really small.
JUC

[erik]

Should Comskip discard any show segement at the start of the recording if its shorter than a couple of seconds? How many?
Or if its shorter then min_show_segment?

[ldavis]

Originally Posted by erik

Should Comskip discard any show segement at the start of the recording if its shorter than a couple of seconds? How many?
Or if its shorter then min_show_segment?

Erik,

What I am going to do since I set my clock ahead 15 seconds is just have Sage start 15 seconds into the show. I think this will fix almost every situation. But I would think that any starting show segment shorter than 10 secs be regarded as commercial. I do not understand why comskip does not discard this anyway being less than the min_show_segment but maybe you could shed some light on that.

[erik]

Actually, no good reason.
I always start recording 5 minutes early(in case the show starts earlier, which does happen here) so I never experienced this problem.
Comskip nearly always detects the previous show and will delete it.

I will ensure in the next build that if the first part of the show is less then min_commercial_break it will get deleted.
min_show_segment will not work because there are reports of shows that start with 30 seconds show, then a commercial break, and then the real show.

Watch my forum for when the next build will happen.

[erik]

At what value did you set min_commercialbreak?
Could you test and set it at larger than the short part at the start, say 10 seconds?

[ldavis]

Erik,

Actually, I am glad you brought up the 30 sec show segment issue. Comskip is dead on 95+% of the time. I don't mean close; I mean perfect - Black screen to black screen. Now, how the STVi interprets the frame numbers is a different story. I am using your debug window as the check. But the 30 sec segment is one of 3 issues that I am having that maybe you could give some input on how to tune:

1.) On certain shows I have small segments as you spoke of (usually sitcoms). I can set the min show segment lower but usually getting down to the 30 sec range as a setting has serious blowback in terms of holes in commercial segments incorrectly marked as shows. In there any tuning parameter that might help?

2.) Occastionally, I see network previews coming out of a commercial segment marked as part of the show. I think they are longer that the min commercial length I have set

3.) Sometimes (rarely) I see an entire commercial missed at the beginning of a segment. On closer investigation, these have been situations where the logo remains right up to the commercial with only 1 or 0 true black frames before the commercial

Thanks in advance for you help.

[erik]

Mmmm.. many questions.

To save me some time I would like to ask you to follow this procedure.

Set
output_framearray=1
and
verbose=10
in your comskip.ini
Run Comskip on the recording.
copy the generated .txt file to a file with the same name but with .ref as an extension.
Edit the .ref file such that it contains the start and stop frame numbers of the commercials as you would like them to be found.
Zip the comskip.ini, the .csv, .log and .ref files together and mail me the zip file so I can have a look.

[ldavis]

Originally Posted by erik

Mmmm.. many questions.

To save me some time I would like to ask you to follow this procedure.

Set
output_framearray=1
and
verbose=10
in your comskip.ini
Run Comskip on the recording.
copy the generated .txt file to a file with the same name but with .ref as an extension.
Edit the .ref file such that it contains the start and stop frame numbers of the commercials as you would like them to be found.
Zip the comskip.ini, the .csv, .log and .ref files together and mail me the zip file so I can have a look.

This is specifically item #1(short show segments). I will get you the other 2 issues as I find them.

[erik]

There is a not yet documented parameter
punish_no_logo=0
If set to 0 as above the absence of logo will not be used against a block.

Why did you go for
global_threshold=0.99
this will score any unknown segment to commercial, this has a high danger of removing short show segments.
All the global heuristics work only when global_threshold is unchanged.

If you choose to do so you MUST have something that scores a block to show to retain it.

With respect to 3) there is a shrink_logo setting that you can use to solve that.

[erik]

The audio decoding fails in your recording. need to understand why.
Could you upload part of the mpeg to my FTP server,
Just the first say 10 or 20 MByte, then abort the upload. Whatever is uploaded will stay at the server
I will PM the details.

[ldavis]

Erik,

I will post a show segment ASAP. I choose the global parameter - 0.99 based on several segments on several shows that were being scored as commercials and should not have but I will set it back to 1.05 for this exercise. BTW for item #3, I already have the shrink logo set to 2.

[erik]

I choose the global parameter - 0.99 based on several segments on several shows that were being scored as commercials and should not have

0.99 is the wrong direction. if a block scores above the threshold it will be marked as a commercial.

[ldavis]

Originally Posted by erik

0.99 is the wrong direction. if a block scores above the threshold it will be marked as a commercial.

Yes, I misstated what I meant. There were commercial segments that were scoring 1.00 so I reduced the global parameter.

I have verified that the sage bug fixes work correctly and I appreciate your help with the plugin problems but I am giving up on Sage comskip until it can accept a time based input. I am going to use Zoomplayer in the meantime. It works perfectly with your output and needs no adjustment. The reason for the change was a program outside the +/-30 sec tolerance and the bug fix made the situation worse.

Hopefully, when more people use comskip with HDTV more people will begin to see these issues. Obviously the two or three of us with this problem are not loud enough to get things changed.

[dshields]

Originally Posted by JUC

same here. Endless loop usually during the first 8-9 seconds of the recording.
JUC

Has anyone come up with good recommendations for this problem? It happens to me all the time.

[scoful]

I am having this problem also - didn't have it with older version (not sure if it was the older version of Sage or Comskip - updated both). Usually occurs at the end of a program that blocks the remainder of the recording off as commercials. Just keeps looping a few seconds indefinately.

[JUC]

Just to keep this going--any workaround yet or new build?
thanks
JUC