With Commercial skipping being pretty flaky and so far the intro skip is working perfectly for me anyway. Are there any plans to just remove the commercial skipping option within the DVR settings and just do an auto scan like for the intro skip for commercial skip?
Don’t say such things! Commercial skipping might need to be tuned in order to achieve the desired results! (it’s using Comskip). There’s plenty of resources for this online. See the end of the support article here: https://support.plex.tv/articles/115003944134-removing-commercials/
and finally see here for some best practices and tips for tuning your comskip.ini file: PLEX DVR - Tuning comskip.ini - What are some changes that people are making to the default?
Once you make some adjustments, you’ll find the commercial skipping to work excellently.
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Totally concur with Brent20, Comskip tuning is required for different countries and sometimes different Television Networks. Adjustments can improve the commercial removal in many cases to a far better desired result. Optimally, a setting to allow different Channels, different ini files would fix many skip issues.
Oh, I completely disagree. I went through those, made the changes suggested to the comskip, and you know what happened? It erased about half of an episode of Brooklyn 99 thinking it was commercials, on a date with no bad weather, no glitches in the stream, no weather maps, nothing. It just skipped it a ton. What’s the harm in having one option to completely remove, and one option to detect? Even the intro skip stinks. Comes on about 15 seconds too early, and when the intro actually does start, the skip intro button disappears.
I also express my desire of Plex extending the SKIP INTRO feature to SKIP COMMERCIALS, too.
For me, I don’t record with Plex DVR but I get expisode recordings from a third party service provider (YouTV).
Having a smart feature like commercial skipping (not changing the recordings themselves) would be a dream. As with the “skip intro” feature, any failure to properly detect breaks would cause no harm to the content.
It certainly would be nice if they had non-destructive edits. Since the current options are only disable and “detect and delete” either they’re just being very clear (good!) or they’re at least thinking about adding a detect and skip option. Comskip is certainly capable of producing a EDL file, maybe adding reading that file in the players is no small feat.
Someone in a thread somewhere wondered if it’s possibly a legal issue. I think Dish was sued for building in that functionality. But then again, I think the Channels DVR uses a similar tech (I don’t know if it’s Comskip), to do non destructive commercial skipping. It would be great if a little birdie could whisper in this forum if it was a legal issue. Though non-destructive edits would create different issues, at least the users would have access to the entirety of their content.
The main reason I moved Plex from Mac to Windows was to use MCEBuddy. I can create custom comskip.ini’s for individual shows, archive recordings in case there are issues, and easily re-run comskip to test said ini files. Make the recordings non-destructive, give me an EDL I can edit in case it’s wrong, and allow me to select the INI per show, I would be a happy boy.
I do not care for Live TV - if this is the legal issue you’re talking about. I am just interested in my own - personal - recording files in a TV show library.
There cannot be a legal issue with that.
I am not even sure if comskip is necessary since Plex is able to analyze the content of each episode by its now (they do for intro skip feature).
Of course, some of the comskip methods could serve as inspiration…
Then, offer a button just as with “skip intro” and let the user decide if the detected commercial break is one and if it should be skipped.
The Dish lawsuit was for DVR material as well. I’m only speculating that a Plex lawyer might see a difference between a recording with ads that are auto-skipped vs the ads never appearing in the recording in the first place. I’m with you, it shouldn’t be that way. But maybe they’re doing little to enhance the feature as a way of keeping their head down.
I think commercial detection and intro skipping are very different. Intro Skip is only analyzing the audio fingerprint of the first 10 minutes to find 30 second matches. The current comskip uses many variables to determine where commercials are. Silence, black frames, logos, captions, commercial block lengths, show block lengths, etc. And each country and service has different parameters, hence the need for individual tuning.
What you describe absolutely should be the rev2 of this feature, and is certainly possible given Comskip can write a simple file that tells Plex where it thinks commercials are. Hopefully this action button of Skip Intro is just testing the waters on how it works in their players.
Thank you for this short overview…
Here in Germany, cutting / removing / skipping commercials is completely legal.
German TV giant RTL sued a German company and lost that law suit after five years.
Personally I would love to have both options. Skip for those I do not care about or remove for those I want to save for the season.
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