In a perfect world I’d love to have fully commercial free shows and I think we all would but given the issues with less than perfect stripping what process are you guys leaning towards for your plex dvr?
Strip with the DVR server?
Strip with a different machine?
Are the additional resources put on a DVR recording 5, 6 or 10 shows or more at a busy times worth it? Even true for those of you who do stripping via a entirely different server?
Most of these questions come from the thought that stripping commercials is far from an exact or perfect process. My research all be far from perfect shows that shows 30 minute shows (often mentioned is The Big Bang Theory is one such show where stripping isn’t perfect). Are there others? I’d think so since content creators and channels would LOVE to thwart such tom-foolery if they could.
Not that PLEX supports it (I don’t think) but would time be better spent building some sort of skip file (like tivo does) and use that for ‘a single button commercial skip’… This would at the very minimum mean less load reading and then re-writing every show you record at least one more time and also protect you from overzealously preeminently altering a show that has some of it missing (this can happen yes)?
Or do most of you just mash the 30 second skip button ala old school tivos since there are so many more things to worry about on a day to day basis!
I must admit I catch my wife getting mad at my ‘single button skipping’ when an interesting movie commercial starts to play (my fault I should have skipped more quickly - lol) and then I hit the skip… I am then forced to scroll back to the movie AD and allow it to play in full for her to watch and THEN I can skip the rest of the ads (with the skip button) provided I do it fast enough so she doesn’t spy some ‘other’ cute or funny AD that she’d also like to see.
–^^ Please tell me I’m not the only person who has to deal with that sorta stuff? ^^–
Anyway if you want to chime in please do… I’d love to hear what direction people are leaning as a whole.
I have gone back and forth on trying the commercial cutting both automated with MCEBuddy and doing it myself with VideoRedo. You can get it accurately with VideoRedo but you have to do it manually. I now only do this on shows I plan to keep copies of. Most of what we watch is deleted after watching so I just use the skip function in the Android TV app (I use the Nvidia Shield as my playback device) or if I am using Kodi for playback. The skipping works great for me as I can hit pause on the remote and hit the right arrow to skip and I can see the paused screen shot so I know when I am back into the show (and skip back 10 seconds if I went too far).
MCEBuddy does have a way for you to just mark the commercials and not cut them out so you can do the commercial skip if the app you’re using has that ability. Again, I haven’t used that App in a while though. It seems more accurate in cutting commercials on certain Networks than others in my experience.
@jjrjr1 said:
Hi
I just entered the world of Plex DVR.
I am on a windows 7 system.
What is the best software to perform commercial removal in that environment?
Thanks in advance.
Best is highly subjective … what works great for one person who records X, Y and Z is the WORST for the person who records A, B & C. At least thats how I read the current state of affairs when it comes to commercial stripping. Elementary might strip perfectly while The Big Bang Theory is mostly hit and miss… The current state of affairs is pretty much the reason for my initial post in the first place. I wish I could be of better news
@jjrjr1 said:
Hi
I just entered the world of Plex DVR.
I am on a windows 7 system.
What is the best software to perform commercial removal in that environment?
Thanks in advance.
If you are interested in trying out some software to do this, MCEBuddy is among the best. Like the OP said above, results may vary. You can tweak and play around with MCEBuddy to get it to work better but it’s not always 100% accurate. As I stated in my earlier post, you can also have it just mark the commercials and then you can skip over them. If one doesn’t get cut out or if too much gets cut out you can always just skip back and not miss your show.
The problem mostly lies in how Networks handle the frames of the broadcast between the commercial and TV Show and if they use logos at the re-start of the show after the commercial has ended. MCEBuddy tries to pick up these points and make it’s cuts there. As an example, there is a certain amount of black space between most commercials ending and the show re-starting. MCEBuddy looks for these points. The problem is that not all Networks or Shows give adequate black space and it gets missed sometimes. Other variable apply as well.
Yeah, it would be nice if plex would support edl files, with auto-skipping of marked areas during playback and the ability to backup into the skipped areas if the marking is wrong. For now I’m using NextPVR, which does a reasonable job of exactly that.
MythTV, Kodi, Mr. MC etc all work perfectly well with EDL files. Great when it works, easy to ignore when it doesn’t, and no heavy re-encode of the large video files needed.
So I am hoping that Plex will (re)gain EDL support, then it would be easy to use com skip or a similar solution to produce them with a post-processing script.
@gerti said:
MythTV, Kodi, Mr. MC etc all work perfectly well with EDL files. Great when it works, easy to ignore when it doesn’t, and no heavy re-encode of the large video files needed.
So I am hoping that Plex will (re)gain EDL support, then it would be easy to use com skip or a similar solution to produce them with a post-processing script.
Interesting, as someone new to plex I didn’t know EDL (skip file support I’m guessing) had been a feature that was then removed… Seems odd to remove such a desirous feature unless it wasn’t working too well and given the baked in on the fly transcoding plex is famous for i could see where those two features might run head first into each other. ( just a super wild guess - but would make sense).
Given some of the comments I’ve read by the CEO about his VERY interesting ideas about being able to ‘own’ tuners in other countries and have the ability via PLEX to record from THEM to your server located … well … anywhere*. He sounds like someone who wouldn’t kill a really great feature without a pretty good reason.
(*) That idea sounds so cool… I buy an OTA 2 tuner card here in the NY area and offer ‘sell it’ to someone in the UK who happens to be selling their 2 tuner card in London or wherever and we just ‘trade IP addresses’… Both parties would need ‘fat pipes’ UP and DOWN with no messy data CAPS getting in the way but yes this would really be fantastic and with the proposed services that are just now seeing the light of day read worldwide gigabit internet via a massive constellation of LEO satellites that is being built by now less than 3 different companies we only need 1 to actually succeed so things look really bright for super fast always on unmetered internet for everyone quite literally ( tho the people at/near the poles will still be mostly left out and or left for last - someone always seems to get the short end of the stick I’m afraid).
When using the DVR function I do not remux or transcode, because my Ubuntu PMS is an older PC. So, I use a Win7 box and MCE to strip and transcode the videos. MCE seems to get the commercial stripping right almost all the time.
@ucjb said:
When using the DVR function I do not remux or transcode, because my Ubuntu PMS is an older PC. So, I use a Win7 box and MCE to strip and transcode the videos. MCE seems to get the commercial stripping right almost all the time.
Interesting … maybe I need to take another look at MCEBuddy I was under the impression that is wasn’t something that you should be expecting to work all of the time.
Q: How many different kinds of shows do you run thu MCEBuddy on daily/weekly basis? It might explain why you are having such good luck with it… Having MCEBuddy work well on TENS of different kinds of shows a week or a month is quite different from using it well on TENS of different kinds of shows a day. If you have a heavy workload (lots of shows and even shows that are often talked about as being issues like The Big Bang Theory) then I really will need to give it another go with MCEBuddy.
Just a FYI. All of the work is done on the comskip/showanalyzer setup. MCEBuddy does a great job of folder watching/queuing and easily setting the trasncode settings.
The quality of the skip analysis is done via comskip (in most cases). Setting proper comskip.ini settings relevant for the shows/provider/your personal setup is what matters.
If you were to say have different comskip.ini files for each network (potentially you could go nuts and have one for each show but that’s probably way overkill and redundant). You could see more accurate analysis.
If the post-processing could determine the network that the show originated on and selected the appropriately tweaked comskip.ini you could even further improve effectiveness.
But just to clarify in digest form. MCEbuddy isn’t what makes it accurate, the comskip settings does. MCEBuddy is a very easy way to set it all up.
When I ran Windows DVR as a primary I used MCEBuddy (paid version) and comskip donator (paid version). They work fairly well with a nice comskip tweak.
On Linux (currently) comskip does quite well with a good comskip.ini setting. Again the comskip.ini is the critical piece for accuracy.
It sounds like MCEBuddy might be the best option, but would be great if someone could help create a list of the .ini files to make things more accurate for automated setups. Since I don’t see Plex going back to the EDL for a while, and I think that has more to do with trying to stay on the legal line with recorded content. But still want to give the users the flexibility to modify things, as they see fit.
I have noticed that one of the issue that will come up is with DRM content, and some people with CableCards can’t access regular cable channels because the providers are listing those channels as DRM. So, I would not be surprised if they dropped the EDL so they can create the ability in the future to access DRM content.
That is why I’m looking for an automated way to strip commercials, because I don’t know how to create those .ini files to strip accurately.
Went to get MCEBuddy and all I found was the donation version, $30. Then found out that Comskip is free but their Comclean I assume is $10 donation. If MCE uses Comskip info then why pay the extra 20?
@jeffddntdt said:
Went to get MCEBuddy and all I found was the donation version, $30. Then found out that Comskip is free but their Comclean I assume is $10 donation. If MCE uses Comskip info then why pay the extra 20?
You don’t have to use MCEBuddy. For Windows it makes it probably the easiest solution to integration comskip post-processing. There are certainly other ways for sure. The paid version adds speed/features is why over the money. Their respective websites go into detail the differences but you may certainly use the free versions of each if you desire. I found it to be worth purchasing both and the cost is very inexpensive even if you only use them for a series of months and not forever as is in my case.
I purchased the paid version of MCEBuddy and Comskip when I used Windows as my DVR OS. I have since moved back to Linux but the MCEBuddy/Comskip combo was pretty easy. I was using NextPVR at the time. Honestly I’m more of a script guy and tend to opt for a nice powershell or batch script that can do all of the variable passing to comskip for an effective post-process. This is what I’m doing in Linux with another user’s contributed shell script.
I tried to use the free version to get use to it before i purchased, but I can’t seem to get it to do anything but convert to different formats. I know I’m doing something wrong, just not sure what.
@jeffddntdt said:
Went to get MCEBuddy and all I found was the donation version, $30. Then found out that Comskip is free but their Comclean I assume is $10 donation. If MCE uses Comskip info then why pay the extra 20?
Well, I myslef prefer to pay people that develop stuff I use - Keeps them at it and all.
But to answer your question more directly…
MCEBuddy Donator version is more updated, has stuff added that works with wildshire’s plexpvr post processing script. i think it’s version of ffmpeg is newer as well.
Comskip - Again Donotor version works is more updated, and runs much faster.
- Keeps them at it and all.