Can VideoRedo be automated to cut commercials

[heatvent]

Ok, assume I have dirmon2 working well to run SA to create vrpj files for all of my tv recordings. I would like to cut the commercials and I understand VideoRedo is the best thing out there for this. Is there a way to automate this process (i.e. have dirmon2 run VR after SA to do the cuts and then cleanup files).

I know there are posts out there but they just seem to talk about how great VR is. Also, FYI, I am running dirmon2 as a service on WHS.

Thanks!

[wrems]

Why do you want to do that?

The problem if you permanently delete sections of your video file is that if SA screwed up and didn’t properly detect the appropriate points of commercials and VRD gutted the file based on these points you would have a messed up recording… and probably a ticked off wife… SA is good but not perfect. If you leave it as is you still retain the ability to rewind your recording to see a section over if it jumped too soon.

If its for archival reasons that's different...

[PLUCKYHD]

I recomend dvrms toolbox for automated removal and even conversion

[wrems]

I think EP’s media shrink can do it. Again it’s only as good as the detection. If you use VRD you can use the VPRJ files and see the cut points and manually adjust them if need be. Then it becomes a non-automated process…

[GKusnick]

VRD has a COM interface and is completely scriptable through Windows Scripting Host. So if you know how to code in VBScript or JScript (or are willing to learn), you can fully automate any VRD task.

[heatvent]

Originally Posted by wrems

Why do you want to do that?

The problem if you permanently delete sections of your video file is that if SA screwed up and didn’t properly detect the appropriate points of commercials and VRD gutted the file based on these points you would have a messed up recording… and probably a ticked off wife… SA is good but not perfect. If you leave it as is you still retain the ability to rewind your recording to see a section over if it jumped too soon.

If its for archival reasons that's different...

I hear ya, but if I watch with commercial skipping enabled, I will probably just live without the few seconds I missed. Also, it's a real space saver to get rid of the commercials and I'm not sure I want to spend the time getting it perfect. I was probably going to see how it goes and if it gets annoying I will figure something else out.

[nyplayer]

Originally Posted by heatvent

Ok, assume I have dirmon2 working well to run SA to create vrpj files for all of my tv recordings. I would like to cut the commercials and I understand VideoRedo is the best thing out there for this. Is there a way to automate this process (i.e. have dirmon2 run VR after SA to do the cuts and then cleanup files).

I know there are posts out there but they just seem to talk about how great VR is. Also, FYI, I am running dirmon2 as a service on WHS.

Thanks!

Here is a job I use. You can set dirmon to run if vprj exist and not to run if donecut exist. Also set to run when file is not in use.

cutCommVRD.bat

set videoredo_path=c:\Program Files\VideoReDoTVSuite\
set priority=low
md %~d1%~p1tmpEncode
START /B /W /MIN /%priority% cscript.exe //nologo "%videoredo_path%vp.vbs" "%~d1%~p1%~n1.vprj" "%~d1%~p1tmpEncode\%~n1.mpg" /t1 /d /q
move /Y "%~d1%~p1tmpEncode\%~n1.mpg" "%~f1"
move /Y "%~d1%~p1%~n1.vprj" "%~d1%~p1%~n1.donecut"
move /Y "%~d1%~p1%~n1.edl" "%~d1%~p1%~n1.edlcut"

[kevine]

Originally Posted by heatvent

I hear ya, but if I watch with commercial skipping enabled, I will probably just live without the few seconds I missed.

You're a better man than me. I would be really *upset* if I missed the last 10 seconds of a season finale or something important like that. Then I may have to buy the episode on Amazon or something to see it. There by negating an disk space saving I had. Not to mention the frustration of finding it, downloading it and watching it on my computer vs my large screen. Now for you, add the time to get all this automated commercial removal running. What was it you were actually saving after all that?

My advice... Get another drive.

[wrems]

I completely agree with kevine. Can you really save that much hard drive space? I haven’t put any official numbers to it but it doesn’t sound like there would be a tremendous gain.

If you grouped the gain from one show (probably a couple of hundred to a few hundred megabytes) and summed it; how many shows would need to be diced to equal the savings of 1 new additional recording? It’s probably more than a 5:1 ratio…

Drives are getting cheaper everyday. Just posted at GeetkTonic was a Hitachi 1TB for $70 and free shipping. That’s like .07 per gigabyte, the possible savings from one recording is only a fraction of that…

Not to dissuade you from your objective, but something to think about.

My .02

[Fuzzy]

Originally Posted by wrems

My .02

300MB?

[nyplayer]

I cut commercials all the time then re-encode to mp4 archive etc... Never had a problem with SA cutting the end ... because you can simply tell it not to.

I use Videoredo to run a Quickfix on the mpg prior to running SA to get rid of any errors etc.. then run SA and have not had a problem.... then use videoredo to remove commercials.

To answer the original question yes Videoredo does a great job of cutting commercials and yes it can be automated.

[heatvent]

Not sure if I understand the previous post but you could save 30+% from a drive space perspective (most half hour shows only have 20 minutes of show and 10 minutes of commercials). It's not necessarily a space issue right now but will be as my collection grows. So why spend another $70 bucks on a drive, time putting it in, formatting it, as well as the additional electricity cost, etc. just to save a bunch of commercials that I plan to just skip over anyway. So to answer your question of how much it will cost, about $70 for the extra drive + electricity forever. If you ask me $1 is too much and I would rather use what I have more efficiently.

As far as the season finale goes, I don't watch a lot of series religiously and would probably be watching the episode live if it was that important. Also, in the end, it's only a TV show and hopefully I wouldn't kill myself or go crazy over 10 seconds of a TV series.

Finally, I would think there could be different buckets for shows. Stuff that you just like to watch (my wife and I still like to watch Friends) that could be automatically edited, and more important stuff (maybe a baseball game I want to watch) that could be excluded and preserved and/or manually edited.

[babgvant]

Originally Posted by PLUCKYHD

I recomend dvrms toolbox for automated removal and even conversion

DTB supports the kind of metadata based decisions (like only do X action where the genre contains "kids"). I use this feature to convert the HD ATSC shows recorded on PBS (all kids shows) to h.264/ac3 (just copies the audio stream). The resulting file is about half the size.

And the next rev will support cc extraction either as an external SRT file, or if you use MKV as the target container it can mux the SRT into the file.