Commercial Advance Beta Release

[krutaw]

Originally Posted by Jere_Jones

What kind of errors would you like? Right now it errors out with a 1 if something drastic happens. Otherwise 0. Did you want an error level indicating if commercials were detected or what? I'm sure I can accomodate whatever.
Huh? Can you elaborate on that. I don't understand.
Heck no I don't mind.
Can you elaborate on this, too. I don't quite follow.

Jere

Oh, and the reporting on all features means that it will make a log entry for successfully finding the file,folder etc. Basically everything it does puts a log entry in right now, I figure I can add code to trim that down once we're sure the code is actually working.

[Jere_Jones]

Originally Posted by krutaw

Oh, and don't be offended, but I started completely from scratch when I built it, simply because it's often faster to do that than to follow someone else's logic. Not to mention that I wanted to add features to the core functionality such as finding the sage directory automagically etc.

I'm not offended in the least. I'm an amateur at programming (as evidenced by the continual stream of bugfixes I keep releasing) and am looking forward to seeing how someone who knows what their doing would attack a problem that I have also attempted.

Jere

[krutaw]

Originally Posted by Jere_Jones

I'm not offended in the least. I'm an amateur at programming (as evidenced by the continual stream of bugfixes I keep releasing) and am looking forward to seeing how someone who knows what their doing would attack a problem that I have also attempted.

Jere

So who else are you getting code from then? lol I'm no master, but am able to get the job done.

[heffe2001]

Most definitely . My storage server I'm working on would work MUCH better on the hardware I am going to use with Linux running it instead of 2k... ESPECIALLY if you add the ability to have it comskip certain programs, and not everything that's stored on there . Now if we could get a output file that's put with each recording for settings (like, this one is comskipped, compressed, etc), so the linux box could do all that, it'd be awesome .

Originally Posted by Jere_Jones

Is there any interest in a version of comskip that will run on Linux?

The original author of the commercial detection algorithms contacted me and suggested he could port it to Linux. All that was needed is a makefile and comskip would compile under GCC.

For those of you that use Linux/Samba to keep the txt/smi files cleared, you could also use it to process your shows for commercials.

Personally, I don't use Linux, so it wouldn't benefit me, but hey, I'm not everyone.

Jere

[Jere_Jones]

It's that time again! Another update!

This one fixes the horrible detection that .42 had due to a simple little bug. Ugh.

I also changed out the command line argument handling and started adding options. In the future you can use "comskip -h" or "comskip --help" to see the potential command line arguments.

I was able to commit to the SVN repository at www.sage-community.org so if you want the source, head over there.

As always, if there are any issues, let me know.

Jere

[Jere_Jones]

Originally Posted by krutaw

So who else are you getting code from then? lol I'm no master, but am able to get the job done.

That's about how I feel. Although, my skill is certainly improving!

Jere

[krutaw]

Originally Posted by Jere_Jones

That's about how I feel. Although, my skill is certainly improving!

Jere

Jere ~

Okay, you've got mail with the initial draft of the script, and a sample log with errors. Let me know how you fare with the script.

[heffe2001]

Might want to check the download, or the file, if you do a comskip -h it shows v.42 instead of .43...

[lovingHDTV]

Wow v43 works so much better than v42. I finally got my system up and running with v42 and was showing it off to my wife, and not one commercial break was detected correctly. I just re-ran it with v43 and they were all marked correctly.

Thanks for the hard work,

[Jere_Jones]

Originally Posted by heffe2001

Might want to check the download, or the file, if you do a comskip -h it shows v.42 instead of .43...

Oops... I forgot to change the version number inside the file. I was in a hurry to get it out because .42 really sucked! But rest assured that if it came from a 0.43.zip then it should work correctly.

Originally Posted by lovingHDTV

Wow v43 works so much better than v42.

It's the simplest things that can cause the biggest problems!

I'm glad it's working again.

Jere

[heffe2001]

I figured it was the new version, but to keep folks from wondering what they have I figured I'd mention it .

[krutaw]

Originally Posted by Jere_Jones

This one fixes the horrible detection that .42 had due to a simple little bug. Ugh.

Jere ~

First off, wow, I didn't realize I was that many versions behind. I'm currently running v0.21 somewhat happily. I gotta say though, that the latest (v0.43) isn't nearly as accurate as v0.211 for me. I know the quick answer to this as far as what to continue using, but I thought I should provide some feedback just in case anyone else is having probems.

I've found that while v0.21 tends to miss approximately 1-2 commercials per show, v0.43 didn't even come close to any of the commercials.

I'm testing with the latest recordings of the following shows:

Star Trek: Enterprise
StarGate SG-1
StarGate Atlantis
Smallville
Good Eats
MXC

Let me know if there's anything I can do to help the accuracy.

[White94Cobra]

I've found that recently it is missing lots of commercials as well. However, even worse is that it is marking parts of shows as commercials. I finally disabled it and erased all of the .txt files. My wife wasn't too happy when it skipped ahead during crucial points and spoiled some shows. I'll revisit it when I have more time to troubleshoot/configure. I think that the black-frame detection seemed to work the best. Thanks for the hard work Jere!!

[abasu2003]

I've been bouncing around these threads so much since i got nielm's stv.

anyway, i just wanted to say that I got the newest commercial skip and its working surprisingly well (compared to some other posts here). I saw it miss one commercial but I haven't seen it call part of the show a commercial for any more than half a second to a second. I was just watching a meet the press, and they cut to the show for 5 seconds in teh middle of a long commercial break, and it recognized it as show. But the cut wasn't even a fade to black. My local broadcast messed up so they had to cut immediately from the commercial into the show. I'm wondering how it detected it actually.

anyways, impressive job. most appreciative.

[mbrown3]

I've just reverted to Malore's last release, since that works pretty well for me. I'll give the most recent one here a try, but unless I get better results than Malore's (which were pretty good - not perfect, but good), then I'll revert back.

[JasonJoel]

I've been having more problems as well (although overall detection is pretty good).

I've had more than one occassion where it marked part of the show as commercial.

I think the problem stems with the new ratio setting, which forces it to mark x% of the show as commercial.

In fact, on one of my Law & Order shows, it caught the end of a previous episode, and then the full episode. On this one there was definitely less commercial in the recording than normal. That is one in particular it marked part of the show as a commercial.

Is there any way to turn that OFF? I know you can adjust it up/down in the INI file, but did not see a way to defeat it entirely.

Jason Bottjen

[Humanzee]

Jere,
Ok the major gripe I posted earlier is void since you corrected the problem with .42 this latest version works far far better. Thanks for the quick update. With regard to the ratio issue.

Originally Posted by Jere_Jones

Actually it tries to find the 30% that is least likely to be a show and marks it as commercial.

Does this imply that if I drop the threshold to 60% it will find the 40% of the recording that is most likely to be commercial and mark it so, even if it isn't a commercial, just to maintain the ratio? And vice verse?

Currently im running the default .70, I notice on many recordings it marks the first commercial break perfectly but later it detects the begining of the commercail break perfectly but the end seems to be randomly set to some point even within the middle of a commercial. Its like the detection is working but the ratio has been met so it just starts playing again. Am I imagining this, or does it have something to do with this ratio thing?

If so I agree with JasonJoel that we should be able to turn this off, at least to test. Or is there one direction it will become more conservative, ie rely more heavily on other detection methods. Are we wrong to assume we are finitely adjusting the show/commercial ratio with this setting? If we are, we could never set it perfectly because I assume no two shows have exactly the same show/commercial ratio.

Another idea might be to set a different ratio that would give a weight to each of the different detection methods. ie trust
black frame detection= 60%
logo detect = 30%
fuzzy logic = 5%
scene change rate = 5%
random guess method = 0%

then throw it into a weighted average, or something get a median for the frames numbers marked as commercial. I'm no programer but you must be doing somthing along these lines to combine the different methods already. It would also help us find which components are helping vs hurting our detection process because we could isolate them. (I guess you already can turn different methods off.)

Again thanks for the quick fix. I though we were going backwards for a couple of days. Just my feedback, I appreciate all the work everyone has done on this project.

[Humanzee]

Just thought of another feature that might be nice. I think it would be good if you could set a lead-in lead-out padding length. What I mean is, evey commercial segment I get detected is about 1/2 second late. ie it fades to black and you see just enough of the commercial to hear half a word or half a bar of music then it skips to the end of the segment. If I could tell it to skip 15 frames before/after it thinks it is supposed to it would solve this issue no sweat.

[David]

When I run comskip 0.43 (says 0.42 in help but downloaded from 0.43 post) (copied both exe and ini file to SageTV Program Files dir) from a DOS window with no args I get a message after the help saying "ComSkip: missing option <file>". But the ini file is right there in the same directory! Also, it's creating log files with each video now (wasn't before with v0.41), and the top of the log file says:

################################################################
Generated using ComSkip 0.42
Time at start of run:
Wed Dec 31 19:00:00 1969
################################################################
Mpeg: \\media\Sage2\MyWifeandKidsTheFellowshipoftheBaby-739062-0.mpg
Exe
Logo: \\media\Sage2\MyWifeandKidsTheFellowshipoftheBaby-739062-0.logo.txt
Ini:

Detection Methods to be used:
1) Black Frame

Why is the time wrong, and more importantly, the comskip.ini file says to use ALL detection methods, not just black frame, so why is that all that is logged? I'm thinking it's not detecting the ini file just like when run from the command line with no args. Any pointers, am I missing something completely stupid?

[vigor]

David,
regarding version it was already mentioned that .43 idents itself as .42 because that part of the code hasn't been updated. If you downloaded .43 then that is what you have.
regarding "missing option <file>" you are actually reading usage information for this utility and it is telling you to provide an input file which is an .mpg to process.
If you don't want logs files, then set verbose=0 in your comskip.ini

Also it looks like your .ini file is not being found by comspkip, I seem to be getting this from time to time too, restarting sage seems to help, I am not sure how this happens.