Commercial Advance Beta Release

[Jere_Jones]

I've had a couple inquiries stating that the precompiled version in the jeredev branch chose different commercials than if compiled with code from the same branch. The only thing I can say is *shrug*. I built that exe right before I commited the changes and the changes to the code were commited as well. Are you (plural) using the same .ini file?

On a different topic -- is comskip ever going to be final? I expect that when comskip detects 100% of the commercials, then it will be final, but this is really malore's project. I'm just trying to help. So I can't say for certain what he wants to do with it. BUT... here's a list of what I plan to include (or would like to see included):

1) Add audio decoding to comskip (useful for detecting silent black frames vice only black frames) ANY help with this would be appreciated!!!!!!! PM me if you can help.
2) Add scene change analysis
3) Add volume analysis
4) Add automatic selection of ini based on either a CLI switch or filename of input file (different settings work better on different shows)

Basically I want comskip to work 99.99%. That is going to require a variety of detection methods. During my vacation, I rewrote almost all of comskips analysis routines to allow for easier inclusion of future techniques and more intelligent selection of commercials (I call it my fuzzy logic routines).

I just got home so give me a little while to settle and I'll commit what I've done.

Jere

[ajuhawk]

I just thought I would put in a word of thanks for everyone that has been working on this project! The commercial skipping is where it's at! I've only used it for the last couple days and I'm not sure I'll be able to watch a live show again.

On a side note I've had relatively decent success with the detection. I'll probably try the latest from Jere as soon as he gets it recompiled to see if that helps with some of the beginning/end of show problems that I've seen. Otherwise this works really well!

Now I just need to search the forums so I can figure out how to modify stvs so I can add the weather module I've seen in other's

[laurenglenn]

Originally posted by Jere_Jones
I've had a couple inquiries stating that the precompiled version

1) Add audio decoding to comskip (useful for detecting silent black frames vice only black frames) ANY help with this would be appreciated!!!!!!! PM me if you can help.
2) Add scene change analysis
3) Add volume analysis
4) Add automatic selection of ini based on either a CLI switch or filename of input file (different settings work better on different shows)

Basically I want comskip to work 99.99%. That is going to require a variety of detection methods. During my vacation, I rewrote

I'd love to see Closed Captioning analysis also for those with CC enabled in the DVD streams.

True, commercials also have closed captioning, but I do believe that even a small Closed Captioning break of 1 second (with a black screen) after having them on constant for at least 5 minutes (during a show) would probably be a dead give-away.

Lauren

[Opus4]

Originally posted by ajuhawk
Now I just need to search the forums so I can figure out how to modify stvs so I can add the weather module I've seen in other's

I think you are new here, so I just thought I would save you a little searching time & say that you can't edit STV files w/o a program called "Studio", but it hasn't been released publicly yet. The few custom STVs that you see around here are from a few people who are on the private beta team. And, before you ask: no, none of us know when Studio will be more widely available. The custom STVs are from people who have worked on those files during their spare time & have shared their results.

- Andy

[ajuhawk]

Originally posted by Opus4
I think you are new here, so I just thought I would save you a little searching time & say that you can't edit STV files w/o a program called "Studio", but it hasn't been released publicly yet. The few custom STVs that you see around here are from a few people who are on the private beta team. And, before you ask: no, none of us know when Studio will be more widely available. The custom STVs are from people who have worked on those files during their spare time & have shared their results.

- Andy

Yeah, it didn't take me very much searching to figure that out yesterday. It was worth a shot though! At least Frey has allowed some beta testing otherwise SageTV wouldn't be near as good without these mods. Like someone in one of the discussions on stvs said - it'll be amazing what happens once (if?) studio is ever released to the masses...

Anyway, thanks for the thoughtfulness

[Grey_Goose]

So can I run this comskip stv on my server & another stv on my client? Then I would only need to map the comskip button on my remote & set the server only to do the processing, as long as I'm using UNC recording dirs?

[ajuhawk]

Originally posted by Grey_Goose
So can I run this comskip stv on my server & another stv on my client?

Grey,

It has been my experience that in order for the client to know that the commercials are there it has to be running malore's stv with the commercial advance beta. Of course I'm knew at this so I may be missing something, but so far as I know if everything isn't set up just so then the client won't have a clue about the commercial skipping. Now if that isn't an issue to you, then yes, you can run a different stv on the client and it'll work just fine, without commercial advance.

[Jason]

Originally posted by ajuhawk
Grey,

It has been my experience that in order for the client to know that the commercials are there it has to be running malore's stv with the commercial advance beta.

How about running a subsequent batch file on the comskipped video to 'trim' out the commercials? While I am not sure as to the command line integration, cutting out specific portions of a video file, using the comskip data, would not be that hard... would it?

You would have to be fairly certain that the comskip data is accurate or you run the risk of editing out the important stuff.

For those of us with an MVP, until a true Sage Front End comes along, this would be a godsend!

-Jason

[laurenglenn]

Originally posted by ajuhawk
Grey,

It has been my experience that in order for the client to know that the commercials are there it has to be running malore's stv with the commercial advance beta. Of course I'm knew at this so I may be missing something, but so far as I know if everything isn't set up just so then the client won't have a clue about the commercial skipping. Now if that isn't an issue to you, then yes, you can run a different stv on the client and it'll work just fine, without commercial advance.

It could run another STV as long as it has implemented commercial advance....

At least this would be true until the day if/when Sage implements comskip internally....

Lauren

[briands]

Is there a parameter for the start and end "padding" for playback with commercial skip? It seems to play several seconds of commercial before skipping forward. It is just long enought that I grab for the remote. I would think it would be pretty easy to nail the commercial start to the black frames and not need the pad. I think it may be a good idea to have some pad on the show restart so that everything can get back in sync. I did not see these parameters in the config file. Have I missed them?

[laurenglenn]

Originally posted by briands
Is there a parameter for the start and end "padding" for playback with commercial skip? It seems to play several seconds of commercial before skipping forward. It is just long enought that I grab for the remote. I would think it would be pretty easy to nail the commercial start to the black frames and not need the pad. I think it may be a good idea to have some pad on the show restart so that everything can get back in sync. I did not see these parameters in the config file. Have I missed them?

I think part of the problem (at least with my STV) was the Wait() function that was put in to keep the system from maxing out the CPU at 100%. The delay on mine is set to 2 seconds in order to keep the CPU usage at around 25% for SageTV.

Not to mention that you have to divide the frame # that ComSkip gives you by 29.97 for NTSC

That would, I assume, give you a slight timing problem (well, that and the jumping to I-frames in an MPEG file that probably occurs)

Lauren

[ellweber]

I'm having a little trouble with commercial advance. I have been trying to run it by dropping xxx.mpg files onto the conskip.exe to try to refine the comskip.ini parameters.

Seems like the first time I try it it runs until it finds a logo then stops, leaving the xxx.logo.txt file and a 0 byte xxx.txt file. Then, if I run it again it runs to completion. If I set the detect_method=1 it runs OK, set to 3 or 15 I get this two pass behavior.

I have tried changing all the parameters in the .ini file that seem relevent but no help there.

Any ideas what could be causing this?

Thanks,

Lynn

Running the latest nielm STV, comskip from 1 Sep, XP pro and this for comskip.ini


detect_method=3 ; 1=black frame, 2=logo, 15=all
verbose=1 ;show extra info
fps=29.97 ;frames per second (NTSC=29.970, PAL=25)
border=10 ;border around edge of video to ignore
max_brightness=180 ;frame not black if any pixels checked are greater than this (scale 0 to 255)

test_brightness=60 ;frame not pure black if any pixels checked are greater than this, will check average brightness (scale 0 to 255)

max_avg_brightness=45 ;maximum average brightness for a dim frame to be considered black (scale 0 to 255)

max_commercialbreak=280 ;maximum length in seconds to consider a segment a commercial break
min_commercialbreak=59 ;minimum length in seconds to consider a segment a commercial break
max_commercial_size=150 ;maximum time in seconds for a single commercial or multiple commercials if no breaks in between

min_commercial_size=1 ;mimimum time in seconds for a single commercial
require_div5=0 ;0=off, set=1 to only mark breaks divisible by 5 as a commercial. Standard sizes (15,20,30,45,60,90,120 second)

div5_tolerance=.75
give_up_logo_search=800 ;in seconds, how far into the show to search for a logo before giving up

play_nice_start=1700 ;at what time of the day should comskip slow itself down
play_nice_end=2359 ;ending time for self slowing
delete_logo_file=1 ;delete logofile after use?

[Jere_Jones]

What OS are you running? I wrote the code on XP Pro. If your running something different, that might be the problem.

Try running it from a command line and let me know what happens.

Jere

*EDIT @ 19:36*

I was just reviewing the code and I think I saw a problem. Do you happen to have any spaces in your path to comskip or the mpeg file?

[ellweber]

Jere,

Running XP pro. Spaces could be the problem as my files are in "C:\Video Files" and similarly on D:

Can you point me to info on the command line parameters? I tried searching but was not successful on the first try.

Thanks,

Lynn

[Jere_Jones]

The only command line parameter is the filename. The basic decoding of the video comes from mpeg2dec and the usage code is still in there, but the only thing that works is:

comskip filename

I've corrected the bug regarding the spaces and will commit to the svn on the sage community website as soon as I can.

Jere

[ellweber]

Thanks,

I did try renaming the folder to Video_Files and still see the same behavior but I will look forward to trying your revised file when it is available. I'll also try the command line execution later.

Lynn

I should add that this is actually working very well, at least for the things I watch. Adding the logo detect is a big step. Thanks for all of your work as well as malore's and all the others who have contributed.

[ellweber]

Jere,

I now think that the problem I have described only occurs to files that are on a different drive. When I run comskip on a file that is on the same drive [C:] as the executable all is well. When I try to process a file that is on D: then no luck as previosly described.

Clues?

Lynn

[laurenglenn]

Originally posted by ellweber
Jere,

I now think that the problem I have described only occurs to files that are on a different drive. When I run comskip on a file that is on the same drive [C:] as the executable all is well. When I try to process a file that is on D: then no luck as previosly described.

Clues?

Lynn

I have my video files stored on Drive E: and Comskip on C:. There's no problem with mine. It creates the TXT files fine.

Try copying COMSKIP.EXE and put it in your WINDOWS folder (or any other folder in your PATH environment variable).

Maybe that will do the trick.

Lauren

[ellweber]

I have all my Sage recorded files in C:\Video Files and D:\Video Files. With comskip in the SageTV folder on C: the files that are in C:\Video Files are processed correctly. With comskip in the SageTV folder or in the D:\Video Files folder the problem noted above still occurs.

However, if I change the folder name to D:\VideoFiles then all is well using the local copy of comskip. I am optimistic that Jere's change regarding spaces in paths will resolve this but I may just change the folder names and take the easy way out!

Thanks for all the help.

Lynn

[redman]

I am still having trouble with detecting commercials.
I can get every black frams detected fine, but the actual calculation of commercials just doesn't work.

No matter how much I play with and tweak and change the settings it won't calculate the breaks.

At the beginiing it was detecting some commercial breaks, but was right about 5% of the time, now I have tried adjusting the commercial sizes and breaks from 2 seconds right up to 9 minutes, tried playing with the div 5 setting and the tolerance from 0.01 through to 2

I am now at a loss, as it seems that all of my latest attempts result in absolutely no commercials being detected at all - even after resetting everything back to original.

Does anyone have the logic details that describe how the frames are calculated into a commercial?