Commercial Advance Beta Release

[chrysek]

malore, I have a question, and wonder if such would be easy to implement.

When I do setup my Sage to record something it starts recording but until it changes channel it does take quite sometime, during that time everything is being recorded, like previous show, channel changing etc. Would it be possible that your commercial skip utility would be able to somehow detect when show was already changed? I mean in your file.txt first entry could be 0 1000 where 0 is the first frame and 1000 would be the first frame of potentially start of the show/movie/event etc. The same at the end of the recording, sometimes recording does end earlier.

I wonder if such could be easily implemented.... I don't care that much at the end of the show if I have other scenes or whatever, what does bother me a bit is that I have recordings with other parts in front.

Thanks for the greatest tool since sage came out.. I love it.. it does work pretty ok for me and it is the nicest feature ) I'm loving it.

Chris

[vigor]

Nice work Malore, thank you for sharing with all of us.

Commercial detection seems to work well. However I noticed on a show like Siendfield towards the end there is a long commerical with a 30sec finale of the show itself (stand-up comedy) in the middle. However the whole thing is marked as commercial. Is it possible to have min/max_show setting to prevent this or maybe there is a better way?

[Jere_Jones]

vigor,

During the part you want to keep is there a station logo in one of the corners? Is it in the same location as the station logo during the show itself?

Jere

[foolio]

can any other player - ie, zoomplayer - use the comskip.txt file to also allow playing and skipping the commercial? Basically, I want to use comskip outside of sage.

thanks

[vigor]

Originally posted by Jere_Jones
vigor,

During the part you want to keep is there a station logo in one of the corners? Is it in the same location as the station logo during the show itself?

Jere

Jere,

Yes, there is a fox-2 logo during the part I want to keep and it is the same logo and in the same location shown during the rest of the show. The logo comes up about 5 sec before the finale and stays on until next commercial. Can this be used somehow?

[Jere_Jones]

Hopefully so. I'm currently working on logo detection as an assist for the black frame detection.

I started by modifying the code from MythTV's commercial skip, but I've found that it's reliability is directly proportional to the opacity of the logo. IOW, transparent logos don't get detected too well.

So I scraped all that code and am working on another mehod that (so far) works much better.

Hopefully, malore will have another update out that will incorporate this soon after I get it to him. I expect to be done with it sometime tomorrow (again... hopefully).

Bear in mind that it won't detect the slightly modified logos that tend to be on promos. For example on the SciFi channel, the logo on the promos is slightly larger and higher. My routines will ignore this modified logo. If this is a plus or minus, that's up to you.

Oh, and the logo detection is more processor intensive (i.e. takes longer). But I think it will be worth it in the end.

Jere

[malore]

Originally posted by foolio
can any other player - ie, zoomplayer - use the comskip.txt file to also allow playing and skipping the commercial? Basically, I want to use comskip outside of sage.

thanks

The files comskip make can't currently be used directly by anything other than my STV, but it is possible to convert them. Somebody has already written a utility to generate VideoRedo cutlists.

[vigor]

Jere, the logo on SpikeTV is not a static image, but a weavy pattern would that be a problem for your detection? Currently the commercial detection seems to fail on this channel already, not sure why.

[Jere_Jones]

I record off of Spike TV daily so I have tested with that channel. My experience has been that they show the SpikeTV logo for 59 seconds and then shift to a square "First network" logo for around 17 seconds. My routines lock on to the SpikeTV logo just fine.

Animated logos will be a problem. I haven't even thought about how to detect them! Ugh...

(The following isn't coded yet)
It shouldn't cause a problem because I plan on using the logo as a way of saying that a segment is NOT a commercial.

Jere

[Crashless]

Is there currently a way to only let comskip run during certain hours of the day? I've found the settings to run while recording, and awake (which is important as I never put sage to sleep), but the slowdown is very noticable while navigating around the system. I would be really great to keep the settings that exist, and add a only hours between setting.

Thanks so much for your work malore, this is really a GREAT feature.

[Jere_Jones]

malore,

I've seen a lot of request for different settings (when to run, what channels to run, etc.) Have you given any thought to a setup page. In the custom menus there is a page for settings. Maybe that can point to a multipage setup, one of which is for commercial detection and skipping.

Of course something as simple as simple as a "play_nice" setting could be used to slow down the comskip program. It would take longer to scan any one show but then it could be used to scan even during recording multiple shows because it would use fewer resources. Incorporating crashless's idea, it could even be something like:

play_nice_start=0600
play_nice_end=2300

During those hours (which are in military time), comskip would slow itself down and when not inside those hours it would run at full speed.

Something like this, I'd be happy to code for you.

Any thoughts?

Jere

P.S. vigor - I saw the white "weavy" Spike logo and it was detected flawlessly

[insomniac]

I wish I could get that setting for my wife....sheesh.

Originally posted by Jere_Jones
malore,

I've seen a lot of request for different settings (when to run, what channels to run, etc.) Have you given any thought to a setup page. In the custom menus there is a page for settings. Maybe that can point to a multipage setup, one of which is for commercial detection and skipping.

Of course something as simple as simple as a "play_nice" setting could be used to slow down the comskip program. It would take longer to scan any one show but then it could be used to scan even during recording multiple shows because it would use fewer resources. Incorporating crashless's idea, it could even be something like:

play_nice_start=0600
play_nice_end=2300

During those hours (which are in military time), comskip would slow itself down and when not inside those hours it would run at full speed.

Something like this, I'd be happy to code for you.

Any thoughts?

Jere

P.S. vigor - I saw the white "weavy" Spike logo and it was detected flawlessly

[Droid]

Malore, comskip is crashing on me....

comskip.ini contains:
verbose=0
fps=29.97
border=10
max_brightness=100
test_brightness=60
max_avg_brightness=15
max_commercialbreak=300
min_commercialbreak=70
max_commercial_size=150
min_commercial_size=4
require_div5=0
div5_tolerance=.75

I do have my video stored on both drive c: and drive e:

What else should I look for? Nothing else is running on this dedicated sage box....

[malore]

Originally posted by Droid
Malore, comskip is crashing on me....

All the time or only some of the time? Does it crash if you run it from the command line? Does it crash on some files and not others? comskip creates the .txt file first thing so you should be able to tell what file it crashed on. Is the creation date of the .txt file before the .mpg file finished recording? Does comskip crash if you manually process the file?

[Droid]

Ok I figured it out... The external Firewire drive must have become disconnected. The files probably showed up on a list or a cache and when comskip went to go process the files it could get to the drive. Probably an error you need to trap. I reset the drive and all is well.

[laurenglenn]

Originally posted by Droid
Ok I figured it out... The external Firewire drive must have become disconnected. The files probably showed up on a list or a cache and when comskip went to go process the files it could get to the drive. Probably an error you need to trap. I reset the drive and all is well.

I just tried the ComSkip on my STV and it works very well!

Great work on the commercial detection! For the most part, I've been getting decent detection.

Thank you for such a great feature!

Lauren

[chrysek]

Malore, could I ask you a big favor? Could you in your STV put above SageTV Recordings something like WatchTV or something that someone could easily watch TV from the main screen?

I would love this option!! Please please!!!!! prety please!!!

Chris

[JUC]

I have a really bad question that I am completely embarrassed to even ask. But, here it goes. Where is the download for malorebeta.zip? The thread title indicates there is an attachment in this thread but I can't find it. I am missing something completely obvious here but...
thanks
JUC

[salsbst]

http://www.sage-community.org/index.cgi/wiki/ComSkip

[malore]

Originally posted by laurenglenn
I just tried the ComSkip on my STV and it works very well!

Great work on the commercial detection! For the most part, I've been getting decent detection.

Thank you for such a great feature!

Lauren

Glad you like it.

Originally posted by chrysek
Malore, could I ask you a big favor? Could you in your STV put above SageTV Recordings something like WatchTV or something that someone could easily watch TV from the main screen?

I would love this option!! Please please!!!!! prety please!!!

Chris

SageTV lets you assign a keyboard shortcut for "Live TV" or you could use a button on the remote to do this also.

Originally posted by JUC
I have a really bad question that I am completely embarrassed to even ask. But, here it goes. Where is the download for malorebeta.zip? The thread title indicates there is an attachment in this thread but I can't find it. I am missing something completely obvious here but...
thanks
JUC

I've updated the first post to include the link to malorebeta.zip. salsbst's link would also lead to info on where to download it.