Linux Comskip without Wine?

[btf1962]

Just a quick question.

Is there a Comskip solution that doesn't involve Wine?

If I do need Wine, does that mean I need to run X, or can I work at a DOS terminal prompt?

Thanks in advance!
--Brad

[btf1962]

OK. After reading throught the SageTV/Comskip/Comchecker posts I'm a little more savvy. I've installed wine (without x) which seems to work fine. I've tested running comskip with wine (successfully) by hand. I'll probably use bcjenkins comcheck.sh script as a daemon (possibly making it an init.d service?)

Then I'll use a comskip aware STV plug-in. After settling with that for a while. I might research daemons to actually snip out the commercials in the mpg files. We'll see.

(At the very least, I'd love any video conversions to be commercial-aware and snip out commercials when converting. That would be really nice for the conversions I do for my Palm TX.)

[bastafidli]

Hello btf, If you by any chance have your collection of links to relevant threads/ports of your notes, can you please post them here? I will be going through the same steps so it would help me greatly and I could possibly combine them to some conside howto.

Thank you.

[btf1962]

Here's what I learned ... Corrections welcome and expected!

Wine
First you'll need Wine. I am using Ubuntu so it's as simple as:

sudo apt-get install wine

Yes, this will suck down quite a few other packages. But you will not be using an X server. (I am using Ubuntu Server 9.10) I don't want to give up either diskspace or CPU cycles to X server software.

For all you need to know about Wine go here. (But, really, once you've installed the package you're done thinking about Wine):

Wine FAQ

comskip
comskip is a Windows binary that runs well through wine.

Here's a good page for the overview and documentation.

comskip Documentation

The same site holds all the download files:

comskip Downloads

You now have the ability to run files by hand through comskip. (But who wants to do that??!!)

You will pay attention primarily to 2 files - the comskip.exe binary and the comskip.ini text file (a default version is included in the zip archive) with all the settings for comskip scanning. You can do something like ...

wine /path/to/comskip.exe --ini=/path/to/comskip.ini /var/media/tv/NameOfRecording.mpg

You'll also see documentation and downloads for comclean here, the binary that actually cuts the commercial blocks out of an mpeg file after comskip has recorded where they are. But I haven't started using that yet. I really don't think I will use comclean unless I'm doing video conversions.

comchecker.sh
Here's the script that you can run to sniff around for your recorded TV files and scan them for commercials in the background.

comchecker.sh

You will want to start this file on startup. (I'm going to put it in /etc/init.d with the appropriate S??comchecker.sh and K??comchecker.sh links.)

You will want to read through the script yourself. Save the original and edit it to use the right values for file paths. It's well documented right in the script.

You might want to put comskip.exe in /usr/local/bin/ and comskip.ini in /etc/ or (my preference) put them both in /opt/sagetv/server/comskip/ (a new directory) since they really aren't used by anything but SageTV. Just make sure that you adjust your settings in comchecker.sh to reflect the accurate paths to these files.

Comskip Plug-In
None of this is any good if your SageTV isn't actively using the generated skip files when playing back your TV recordings ...

Here's the plug-in you will have to import to modify your STV XML file so that SageTV is aware of and skips over commercials (for files that have been through comskip).

Comskip Plug-In Download Page

I think that covers it. Let me know how it goes.

--Brad