Probably going to donate and get the newer MCEBuddy. It’s all your fault, WCTschumy! ;-D
But seriously, thanks for the suggestions. There is so much you can do with it without having to write scripts that would make my brain hurt if I could manage it at all. Even the free version offers a lot but it’s clear that I’ll need the donator version to do what I’d really like. As far as a per-show comskip.ini file, so far The Big Bang Theory is the only one I have and it’s just a simple one line change, nothing really difficult, just the end bit getting cut off most shows. So it doesn’t bother me now that the Plex commercial skip is broken for now. I couldn’t go back to using it anyway now. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great basic option, but MCEBuddy can do the same and much more.
Looping back… it started working again after I placed the supplied “comskip.ini” or any valid one here:
“:\Users<Plex UserName>\AppData\Local\Plex Media Server\DVR\comskip.ini” .
Replace the above to suit your server and test please…
This path doesn’t exist by default. Only if you want to use a customized comskip.ini, you create it yourself.
Please report back if this should solve your issue as well.
You can find the original comskip.ini in the Plex program folder, in the subfolder Resources.
I just tested plex commercial skipping with a valid comskip.ini file in the C:\Users{username}\AppData\Local\Plex Media Server\DVR\ directory and commercial skipping worked for the sample TV episode.
Debug logging was enabled for the test just to see that info. There was no “invalid argument” error for the plex commercial skipper process. The plex commercial skipper process did show exit code 1 (failure) despite having seemingly worked. The process to actually remove the commercials seemed to run fine with no errors. So TMC made a significant find here. I was honestly skeptical but you never know until you test.
Plex updates do seem to break core functionality fairly often lately and can be slow to fix it. I’d be interested tp hear how you do with Emby but that switch is more than I want to take on right now.
I have started using MCEBuddy, only partly to backfill commercial skipping being broken in Plex. Most shows I record worked well with the standard comskip.ini, but not all. MCEBuddy lets me handle those shows differently without too much effort. I can also easily keep backups of the original recordings to allow experimenting with different comskip.ini settings. There are more advanced MCEBuddy options that I’ll be looking at as well. So even once Plex straightens out commercial skipping, I’ll still be using MCEBuddy for at least some shows.
I will say though that when Plex commercial skipping was working, it was very fast and efficient. The default MCEBuddy configuration does a lot of copying files back and forth and takes considerably longer than Plex to finish. But MCEBuddy is so configurable that the process can be streamlined a lot. But it’s possible that I’ll go back to using Plex for the majority of shows because it is so efficient. It all depends on what tests show work the best.
