I finally managed to get the whole comskip thing under control using Scheduled Tasks, but for anyone playing with this, there are some more additional caveats I discovered:
- As @pshanew pointed out in an earlier post, when Plex runs commercial skip, it only notes that the file was processed if it found commercials. If commercials were not found, this same file will be processed again, and again, and again, every night when the Scheduled tasks kick in. What makes this less palatable is that it seems to start with older files first, which means if you have several files in a library which do not have any ads, it will never make it to the newest files that might have been added since the day before. I solved this problem by moving anything that didn’t have ads into another library, which does not have commercial skipping enabled
- When scheduled tasks wakes up, it does a single pass on the library to find new files that need comskip processing. If files are added after that time, they will not be processed until the next wakeup cycle (the next day); so, in most cases, it will take around 24 hours before commercial skipping is available for new files which were not recorded by Plex. This is not the case for “Recorded Items”, which are processed immediately. This can be overridden by choosing “Analyze” from the menu at various levels to tell it to run a manual comskip on that item immediately. The is also a command-line tool called “Plex Media Scanner” which can be placed in a cron job to run only comskip on specific items or shows, but I couldn’t get it to work properly (a task for another day).
