dj7675 wrote:

Wondering if it would be possible for MPlay to be able to read commercial skip flags from some of the commercial skip programs out there? For example videoredo, or sagetv that has built in commercial skip or other 3rd part commercial skip plugins. I could send a samples that have been processed by commercial skip apps. It would be very cool to have an app processing video to automatically set the markers and then just play it in MPlay. Possible?

Thanks again for your work.

Darin

Send me one of the files and I can take a look. No promises without seeing the files, but it sounds like it should be possible.

TheEndless

Will do. Thanks for taking a look. I will try to make them relatively small. but they may be too large for an email attachment. Let me know what is the easiest way to get them to you.

Darin

I have found a fairly generic commercial detection program that looks like it can be used with pretty much any pvr software. I am using sage but I think it will work with any. Hopefully Mplay can use the output that comskip uses. It outputs a small text file that marks the commercial blocks. See link below for more info on comskip.

http://www.kaashoek.com/comskip/files/manual.htm
http://www.sage-community.org/index.cgi/wiki/ComSkipFaq

I will send you one of the output files as soon as I get it up and going....

Actually the output is a file named the same as the recording. The extension can either be .edl or .txt. See below for an example format.

245.045 501.635 0
956.423 1166.77 0
1756.52 1916.92 0


Darin

dj7675 wrote:

Wondering if it would be possible for MPlay to be able to read commercial skip flags from some of the commercial skip programs out there? For example videoredo, or sagetv that has built in commercial skip or other 3rd part commercial skip plugins. I could send a samples that have been processed by commercial skip apps. It would be very cool to have an app processing video to automatically set the markers and then just play it in MPlay. Possible?

Thanks again for your work.

Darin

YES PLEASE!! edl files would be best since they are a) more accurate, and b) Mplay's already looking for txt files for another purplose.

If using comskip utility, you may also want to consider comskip monitor. It will monitor your video directories and process the video files as they are recorded. See link below for more info on comskip monitor.
I think I am going to give another program a go that people seem to have even more success with, showanalyzer/dirmon2. Show Analyzer detects/marks commercials and dirmon monitors the directories for files. See below. It operates in the same way outputing .txt or .edl txt based files marking the frame start/stop points of the commercials.

Show Analyzer/Dirmon2 website/links
http://www.dragonglobal.org/showanalyzer.htm
http://www.dragonglobal.org/forums/showthread.php?t=562

TheEndless,

Do you think it is possible to get MPlay to work with these type of programs that mark commercials?

I don't want to do through the time of setup of it doesn't look like it will be possible.

Thanks for looking at the possibility.

Darin

dj7675 wrote:

TheEndless,

Do you think it is possible to get MPlay to work with these type of programs that mark commercials?

I don't want to do through the time of setup of it doesn't look like it will be possible.

Thanks for looking at the possibility.

Darin

I won't know without seeing one of the .edl files. Can you email me one? If they store the cuts as byte offsets, then it should be possible. If it just records the frame number, then it's much less likely, because we don't have access to that information via the Cascade API.

TheEndless

Thanks for your reply. I will find out what it provides, and hopefully post an example .txt and .edl output file.

Darin

From the developer of comskip....example of .txt and .edl files below. It seems that both are based on frames . I will try to find out of there is a way for it to output based on bytes, or if it marks the actual video file in some way that Mplay could detect.

Example of .txt file

Quote:
FILE PROCESSING COMPLETE 111472 FRAMES AT 2997
-------------------
1 1784
24797 30046
35515 41854
54023 62691
72359 79663
89269 96566
102875 111472

The third and next lines denote one commercial per line.
The numbers are the start and end frame number of the commercial

Example of .EDL file for the same recording

Quote:
0.00 59.53 0
827.39 1002.54 0
1185.02 1396.53 0
1802.57 2091.79 0
2414.38 2658.09 0
2978.61 3222.09 0
3432.60 3719.45 0
Where each line denotes one commercial, start and end time in seconds from the start. The zero at the end of the line tells it should be skipped.


Edit: I should read my own posts better. EDL files appear to be based on time positions in the video files, and txt files are based on frame position. Will EDL files based on time position work?

TheEndless wrote:

I won't know without seeing one of the .edl files. Can you email me one? If they store the cuts as byte offsets, then it should be possible. If it just records the frame number, then it's much less likely, because we don't have access to that information via the Cascade API.

TheEndless

If you need/want it, I could put up the mpg, and both edl and txt comskip files for a show.
If you have somewhere I could upload it, I could do that, or I probably have enough space left on my homepage to stick it up there until you can grab them.

dj7675 wrote:

If using comskip utility, you may also want to consider comskip monitor. It will monitor your video directories and process the video files as they are recorded. See link below for more info on comskip monitor.
I think I am going to give another program a go that people seem to have even more success with, showanalyzer/dirmon2. Show Analyzer detects/marks commercials and dirmon monitors the directories for files. See below. It operates in the same way outputing .txt or .edl txt based files marking the frame start/stop points of the commercials.

Show Analyzer/Dirmon2 website/links
http://www.dragonglobal.org/showanalyzer.htm
http://www.dragonglobal.org/forums/showthread.php?t=562

8< snip >8

Darin

I'm using Dirmon/Showanalyzer. It's pretty good at marking the commercials.
Every once in a while Showanalyzer spazz's out on a file and just sits there. I have to kill the process so that Dirmon can fire it up again and process more files.
This last time I think I am seeing the pattern that it causing the problem. I think it' s a particular cable access show on Comcast. If I can verify that I can send off the offending mpg to the SA programmer so he can figure out why it's freezing on that file.

I was actually thinking of trying Comkip/Comskip monitor to compare. Maybe after I get back from Maine later in January.
Are you having troubles with Comskip? Lockups, not marking correctly, or something else?

I actually aren't running either one yet. Before I went to the trouble of installing it I wanted to see if Mplay could use the results to skip commercials. I use 3 roku's to watch recorded sd and hd from sage and it would be very cool if it did...
Seems that each has there own preference. According to quite a few users, comskip does seem to work very well for many users. Thanks for posting your experience with showanalyzer.

Darin

dj7675 wrote:

I actually aren't running either one yet. Before I went to the trouble of installing it I wanted to see if Mplay could use the results to skip commercials. I use 3 roku's to watch recorded sd and hd from sage and it would be very cool if it did...
Seems that each has there own preference. According to quite a few users, comskip does seem to work very well for many users. Thanks for posting your experience with showanalyzer.

Darin

There seems to be 2 camps, one for each setup. I went with SA/Dirmon because at the time I set it up Comskip was behind in development. It seems to have caught up, some may even say it's ahead now.
It would be interesting to see a comparison between the two. Performance (i.e. Speed and resource requirements) and accuracy. For me, the accuracy would be paramount since so far, my hardware is coping quite nicely.

TheEndless,

The developer of Comskip said the following in regards to my question about storing the cuts as byte offsets.


"Comkip can not output byte offsets.
But I assume his player can seek in the timeline and using the .TXT file one can calculate the fraction of the total file where to reposition

Using:

FILE PROCESSING COMPLETE 111472 FRAMES AT 2997
-------------------
1 1784
24797 30046
35515 41854
54023 62691
72359 79663
89269 96566
102875 111472

you divide the frame number by the total frames (111472 in this case) then multiply by the total size of the file and you have an approximation of the byte offset number.
This math must be done in 64 bit integers because the file size can exceed 2GByte."

dj7675 wrote:

TheEndless,

The developer of Comskip said the following in regards to my question about storing the cuts as byte offsets.


"Comkip can not output byte offsets.
But I assume his player can seek in the timeline and using the .TXT file one can calculate the fraction of the total file where to reposition

Using:

FILE PROCESSING COMPLETE 111472 FRAMES AT 2997
-------------------
1 1784
24797 30046
35515 41854
54023 62691
72359 79663
89269 96566
102875 111472

you divide the frame number by the total frames (111472 in this case) then multiply by the total size of the file and you have an approximation of the byte offset number.
This math must be done in 64 bit integers because the file size can exceed 2GByte."

Cool. I thought about that, but I wasn't sure if the 111472 was the total number of frames or just the last frame of the final commercial skip. If it is the total number of frames, I can probably work out something that will be close enough for you (maybe a second or two off). I'll look into it...

TheEndless

Great news. Looking forward to it. So I should set up comskip to output the .txt format, or the .edl format?

Thanks again.

Darin