Commercial Advance Beta Release

[vigor]

Originally Posted by 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.

I actually like seeing 1/2 second of a commercial because then I know comskip is working correctly and not skipping the actual show. I don't think its even worth programmer's time to battle for such a small gain. Now trying to figure out how to use CCs for commercial detection could be useful.

[David]

Thanks I'll try a Sage TV restart and see if that helps. Then to bed, later than I was planning...

[vigor]

Jere,

comskip is crashing on some files within a few seconds of being started, it consistenly crashes on some of my recent recordings.. but not all, I went back to version .21 and it seems to be dealing ok with my .mpg.
No useful info captured in the logs, last line read "The time is now 2327 so it's full speed ahead!" It seems to be specific to some .mpgs and doesn't metter if its started from Sage or command line.

[Jere_Jones]

I just wanted to post a quick note that I am not ignoring anyone and will address these issues as soon as I get the chance (hopefully today ).

Thanks for the input and the ideas.

Jere

[eaug]

I have recently begun using the commercial skip add on. I am using Sage TV on an older PIII w/ 256meg of RAM and every time I have it run a commerical skip it freezes in the process (usually a minute or two into the process). I tested the program on my new computer and it works perfectly, unfortunately the old computer is where I use Sage TV.

I took a look at the task manager it it looks like the program uses A LOT of memory. Is that something that can be reduced? Is the memory the cause of freezing my computer?

I hope for any input since I love the way the commerical skip does work.

Thanks to all in advance!

[David]

Restarting SageTV fixed my earlier problem of not detecting the INI file. I haven't had a chance to see if it worked on the test file I started it on, 'cause I went to bed and then got up late this morning. I'll check later tonight. From the start of the logfile it looks like it was detecting the logo and everything before I left it! I can't wait to see what kind of accuracy this has compared to 0.40 which is what I was running before.

I did also notice that comskip jumped up to 40-50MB of mem usage in the new version, as opposed to 2-3MB in the last version I ran. Is that due to the extra processing methods? My system has 512MB RAM so it should handle it all right but it is interesting. If it makes it run faster (and I don't know if it does), I'm all for it :-)

[RedCoat999]

It works fine and dandy on my computer. See my signature for stats. I do have 384MB of memory. I would definately recommend having as much memory as possible for this sort of application.

Originally Posted by eaug

I have recently begun using the commercial skip add on. I am using Sage TV on an older PIII w/ 256meg of RAM and every time I have it run a commerical skip it freezes in the process (usually a minute or two into the process). I tested the program on my new computer and it works perfectly, unfortunately the old computer is where I use Sage TV.

I took a look at the task manager it it looks like the program uses A LOT of memory. Is that something that can be reduced? Is the memory the cause of freezing my computer?

I hope for any input since I love the way the commerical skip does work.

Thanks to all in advance!

[Jere_Jones]

Originally Posted by vigor

Jere,

comskip is crashing on some files within a few seconds of being started, it consistenly crashes on some of my recent recordings.. but not all, I went back to version .21 and it seems to be dealing ok with my .mpg.
No useful info captured in the logs, last line read "The time is now 2327 so it's full speed ahead!" It seems to be specific to some .mpgs and doesn't metter if its started from Sage or command line.

Vigor,
It would help me a lot if you would send me the first 6 megabytes of a show that crashes comskip. The best way to do this as to avoid manipulation of the mpeg stream is via WinRar. Rar it up with a span size of 6 megabytes and then email only the first file to me at my email address in my signature. If your email server won't let you send an attachment that big, just use a smaller span and send me the first 6 meg worth.

Thanks,
Jere

[Jere_Jones]

Originally Posted by David

I did also notice that comskip jumped up to 40-50MB of mem usage in the new version, as opposed to 2-3MB in the last version I ran. Is that due to the extra processing methods? My system has 512MB RAM so it should handle it all right but it is interesting. If it makes it run faster (and I don't know if it does), I'm all for it :-)

The extra size is for logo detection since it needs to compare 50 different frames at the same time to isolate the logo. I'm working on allocating the memory dynamically so that the memory will be released after it's located the logo, but it will still need to use that much memory at some point.

Jere

[Jere_Jones]

I have updated the ComSkip Logic page on the Sage Community web site. For those that are curious how comskip actually work, that should explain it. I've tried to keep it as simple as possible.

Originally Posted by JasonJoel

I think the problem stems with the new ratio setting...Is there any way to turn that OFF?

There is a global_threshold setting in the ini file (see here) that will override the ratio score. The problem is that the ideal score threshold is different for every show. Try setting verbose to 1 and take a look at some of the scores. Personally, if you're going to set a global threshold, I recommend 1.0.

Originally Posted by Humanzee

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.)

I will put the modifiers into the ini file for the next version. If y'all can come up with better ratios then I'm all for it.

Originally Posted by Humanzee

I think it would be good if you could set a lead-in lead-out padding length.

That's easy enough. It will also be in the next version.

Originally Posted by David

Why is the time wrong

The time was a bug that I've fixed now.
I'm pretty sure that the log you posted was created with .42. I recommend searching your drives for extra copies of comskip. Sage may be running one of them.

Jere

[David]

Actually the restart fixed the logfile date problem as well...seems to be working well from the limited testing I've had time to do so far! I know it's version 0.43 because I downloaded directly from your 0.43 post above, and also I never had 0.42 (it's also just in the SageTV directory, except for the download folder in My Documents which of course is not in my PATH).

I can understand the extra memory for the scanning; if as you say you can cut it down after looking for the logo so it's just for a limited time for each file, that would probably be a good trade-off.

[AJ Bertelson]

I am coming into this thread very late and haven't read much of it but I was wondering if there was any way if it was possible to get the commerical skip program to run at certain times of the day. At night I leave my workstation running and sagetv is minimized and it would be really nice to have it run in the background. When I get home I am usually playing games though and need all the resources I can get.

[krutaw]

Originally Posted by AJ Bertelson

I am coming into this thread very late and haven't read much of it but I was wondering if there was any way if it was possible to get the commerical skip program to run at certain times of the day. At night I leave my workstation running and sagetv is minimized and it would be really nice to have it run in the background. When I get home I am usually playing games though and need all the resources I can get.

AJ ~

I've written a vbscript that I sent to Jere for testing that is to be used for this specific issue. Once all is working as designed, the script will be posted as open source for all to use as they want. Specifically, the way I've got it setup on my system is running as a scheduled task during the wee hours of the morning on my sagetv machine.

If you're interested in the specifics, here's a link to the specific features the first version of the script will fully support:

http://forums.freytechnologies.com/f...&postcount=335

[Jere_Jones]

Once again, an update. This one adds quite a bit of functionality. I hope y'all find it useful.

Added features

• Can output a VideoRedo project file (Thanks to Malore!)
• Can output a Zoomplayer cutlist (using Jumps) (Thanks to Malore!)
• Can output a Zoomplayer chapter file
• Score modifiers can be set via ini file (see here)
• Padding can be added to the commercial breaks (i.e. make the breaks smaller)
• Memory is dynamically allocated and deallocated (greatly reduces the memory footprint)

Bug fixes

• Date in log file was incorrect if no play_nice settings were found
• Not using fuzzy logic caused no commercial breaks to be saved
• Command line arguments were not passed to the second pass

For those that have better detection with v.21, setting detect_method=1 in v0.50 should provide the exact same results.

The source files are located on sage-community.org (Thanks Tom!)

Enjoy,
Jere

[AJ Bertelson]

Do we have to use Malores beta for this and can it be used with the client?

edit I read the FAQ a bit more and I confused on this step

Sage, client or server, looks to open a file in the same directory path that the server looks in to find the commercial information file. So if your server has the recording located in C:\SageRecordings then the client is going to look for the file C:\SageRecordings\ShowFileName.txt, which isn't there because it is on the server. To get around this, configure all of your Sage Recording directories using UNC names (ie. \\SERVER\PATH). So if the name of your Sage server is MySageBox and you store your recordings in D:\SageRecordings which is saged as Recordings_D then you would want to use \\MySageBox\Recordings_D\SageRecordings. Make sure you can mount the drive on your client before you do this.

where do I put this information in?

[malore]

nielm and laurenglenn have also added support for commercial skipping to their STV files.

I don't have the SageTV client so I don't have firsthand knowledge of it. To setup the server to use UNC names you would change the Video Directories setting in Detailed Setup. If you record all your shows on a second drive on the server, you might be able to just network map the drive to the same letter (ex. D: ) on the client instead of using UNC.

It's my understanding that switching to UNC only allows shows recorded after the switch was made to work correctly.

[krutaw]

Originally Posted by AJ Bertelson

Do we have to use Malores beta for this and can it be used with the client?

edit I read the FAQ a bit more and I confused on this step

Sage, client or server, looks to open a file in the same directory path that the server looks in to find the commercial information file. So if your server has the recording located in C:\SageRecordings then the client is going to look for the file C:\SageRecordings\ShowFileName.txt, which isn't there because it is on the server. To get around this, configure all of your Sage Recording directories using UNC names (ie. \\SERVER\PATH). So if the name of your Sage server is MySageBox and you store your recordings in D:\SageRecordings which is saged as Recordings_D then you would want to use \\MySageBox\Recordings_D\SageRecordings. Make sure you can mount the drive on your client before you do this.

where do I put this information in?

AJ ~

It's talking about the video directories and how they're configured. Specifically, I avoided putting anything on the C drive because I thought this might become a problem later.

I haven't applied the skin to my client machine yet, but I'll give it a whirl tonight when I get home. I'm thinking that all that will be necessary is to make sure that the same drive letters are mapped so that things like this work properly.

[Cayars]

Hello Jere,

Great program you have there. I'm a VideoReDo user and love the ability to create the project files for it automatically now.

What I'd really like to be able to do is have the ComSkip automatically generate both the ".txt" file and the ".Vprj" file. I know I can do this using the command line but is there a way to get this to happen automatically when the program is run from SageTV?

Thanks,
Carlo

[Jere_Jones]

Originally Posted by Cayars

Hello Jere,

Great program you have there. I'm a VideoReDo user and love the ability to create the project files for it automatically now.

What I'd really like to be able to do is have the ComSkip automatically generate both the ".txt" file and the ".Vprj" file. I know I can do this using the command line but is there a way to get this to happen automatically when the program is run from SageTV?

Thanks,
Carlo

Sure, just put the following in your comskip.ini:

output_default=1
output_videoredo=1

[Cayars]

Must have overlooked that one!

Thanks,
Carlo