I just updated to Plex Server 1.21.1.3876 recently, and I noticed a new Plex issue this morning: The Plex Commercial Skipper executable isn’t terminating. Plex Commercial Skipper.exe is also using 2 of my processor cores about 100% of the time. However, no Plex activity is showing in the upper right corner yellow indicator on the Plex Server.
I have a Windows gadget on my desktop that continuously monitors CPU usage, and noticed the higher CPU behavior when I got online at 4:00 AM (nothing should be going with Plex at this time).
This should probably be brought to the developers. Are there any diagnostic logs I can post before I reset my PC to clear the issue?
An additional data point: I had a recording occur this morning after I posted the start of the thread. That recording was supposed to delete commercials, while some of my previous recordings are set up to mark commercials for skip.
After deleting the commercials this morning, the Plex Commercial Skipper.exe had terminated.
I too am finding the Plex Commercial Skipper.exe running all the time now and the HD containing all of my DVR content is constantly reading/writing. I record about 5 shows in the morning and about 7-10 shows in primetime. I have set “Detect commercials and mark for skip” under Live TV & DVR settings.
I have a lot of episodes on the DVR hd, Done the scanner go through all of the episodes each time, or only the ones that are added? If all the time, does it not know when it has processed a file, so it doesn’t have to process it again?
Is there a log file for this specific task? It looks to me like it may be spinning on a specific file or item.
There is definitely something going on here. Thing runs all the time, yet of two shows recorded yesterday, back to back, first show was processed for commercials, the second was not. Hey Plex guys, get me a debugging version of the skipper so we can solve this.
So on Linux I am able to hover over the process in the System Monitor to see what the terminal command is. This shows the following:
The thing is, this episode had commercials removed last year when it was first recorded, and after the process finishes, the file remains unchanged (because, again, commercials were already removed).
You know, I wonder if Plex is slowly making its way through old TV in order to analyze it for commercial skipping (as opposed to commercial deletion/removal). The commercial skipping is a newer feature, so maybe its designed to re-analyze everything in the library in order to give the option to skip commercials when watching old stuff. The more I think about it, the more I think that might be what’s going on. It would be nice if it didn’t have to do this for episodes where commercials were already removed.
