I am running Windows Media Center with a commercial skip plugin, and I would love to retire that old computer. So when I heard that Plex was going to offer commercial skip I was very excited. This would be the killer feature that would make me a subscriber. But I just cannot wrap my head around their design. It seems to me by removing the commercials (instead of marking where they are and allowing the user to skip past them) you introduce 2 huge problems: 1) lots of CPU overheard and loss of quality when it creates the replacement video file that has the commercials stripped, and 2) if the commercial skip gets it wrong and removes part of the show, it’s lost forever.
What am I missing? Why in the world didn’t they at least make it optional to automatically remove them instead of marking them?
I’m with you on this. It’s one of the reasons I stopped using the Plex DVR. I run Plex on a Synology NAS and the commercial removal sucks all the power it has.
I use Channels DVR now and it marks commercials so they can be easily skipped during playback without bringing my NAS to its knees. I would love for Plex to add an option for marking commercials instead of removing them. That way, people running Plex on multi-core Xeon servers can continue to remove commercials and everybody else can still skip commercials easily on normal hardware.
Thanks for the tip on Channels DVR - looks pretty solid! I’ll stick with WMC for now since it’s free, but it’s good to know about this option - $8 is a bit higher than I’d like to pay, but I’d consider it for a solid DVR that does commercial skipping the right now.
As a Beyond TV user for 14 years and brand new Plex Pass lifetime subscriber I could not agree more. I paid for a Plex Pass despite the poor design choice with respect to commercials. Beyond TV only had detection, it did not have the ability to remove built-in (though there were ways to script that if you wanted). The number of times it got the commercials wrong convinced me that I would never want it to be a destructive process.
What I’d love to see Plex do is make commercial removal optional when you detect. Give us an easy way to skip to the end of a commercial while watching (Beyond TV used the up cursor key). After commercials have been detected and we have watched (or just checked) the file, give us the option to queue up commercial removal for that file.
I would love to be able to verify the show then have it remove commercials while it transcodes to a better format. Commercial removal plus conversion from HD .ts file to H264 would save a ton of space and I bet the total of the time spent would be less since you’d save about 30% of the transcoding work which is likely more CPU intensive than the commercial detection. Seems all win to me.
Not to just be a “me too”, but I’m currently on MythTV, and it’s commercial marking feature works pretty good as well. I’d love to be able to switch my DVR over to Plex as well, and until they get their commercial system to be non-destructive, I will not be buying a premium PlexPass. As soon as they get this figured out, I’ll sign up.
You’re probably better off if Myth works for you. I was really excited about Plex when I finally switched from Beyond TV but I’ve found Plex to be very unreliable. It will sometimes just not record a show with no explanation as to why. It also seems to just lose track of what it’s supposed to be recording. I had about 5 shows set up to record all new episodes on one of my systems, I just checked it and it only had one of those shows set up to record. I successfully set it up to record the other ones again but I have zero confidence that it will stay that way.
The DVR features have been around long enough that I assumed they were fully baked but to me they feel very incomplete. On top of that these forums do not seem to be terribly helpful with troubleshooting. I’ve seen multiple people describe the kinds of problems I’ve had but none that I’ve seen have received a useful response or path to a solution.
I’m thinking of going back to Beyond TV as a recording engine while trying to use Plex as a front-end. I guess the upside is that Plex has broken my year’s long habit of watching too much TV because it’s not recording all the episodes and without continuity I just don’t bother watching.
Plex DVR really needs to adopt a non-destructive commercial skip model. The method used now is terrible for all the reasons mentioned above, not to mention it’s not accurate and prone to deleting actual content according to some reports. At least with just skipping content is never deleted from a recording.
Channels is a little pricey for just the DVR subscription (I already had the app), but it’s such a better watching and commercial skipping experience. I’ve been using it for a couple months, and basically will probabaly not go back to using Plex as a DVR until it at least hast non-destructive skipping, at least as an option.
Curious if the “UNO Everywhere” initiative will pave the way for non-destcructive commercial skipping soon. One of the roadblocks was purportedly that all the Plex players didn’t support “chapter markers” or whatever they are called that’s used to mark commercials to be skipped.
Does anyone know if “UNO Everywhere” now addresses this limitation?
Actually, Channels DVR, as I mentioned in the previous comment now does exactly what I want—I’d just prefer it be built into Plex.
MCEBuddy is Windows only, which doesn’t help macOS Server users, and it’s not a simple solution to something that would ideally just be built into Plex.
Mine has Channels/MCEBuddy… the MCEBuddy part has been working for more than a decade, the Channels DVR part, more recently since we had the funeral for WMC (sniff, good-bye old friend…).
I can say, without reservation Plex-DVR has many miles to hack through this jungle before they will EVER match the service MCEBuddy has been automatically performing since before your 4th grader was born…
BTW… do you just use Channels to watch everything, or do you, somehow have Channels and Plex on speaking terms?
I do have the Channels DVR directory as part of my Plex TV Library, so recordings are totally playable in Plex, but just without the double-tap forward to skip the commercials feature—so I generally use the Channels app to watch DVR recordings, as it’s a better watching experience with the commercial skip.
I feel duty bound to remind you that dynamic storage libraries - ones that have partial files in the process of being created - are NOT recommended as Plex Library Folders.
At the first sign of smoke out of that left engine - bail out!
She’s Gonna Blow!
I have MCEBuddy process then copy files to one of two Plex Libraries - one for Movies and one for TV Shows and it works fine almost all the time. Nothing automated can be absolutely fool proof I guess. MCEBuddy won’t start working on files until they are done. I can’t say the same for Plex.
I could be wrong, but I don’t think the folder I have included is where partial files exist. I think it’s the folder Channels moves the completed files to post-processing. Channels also post-process the files for comskip, and they don’t seem to show up there until that’s been done.
In any event, I’ve not run into any problems… as yet.
