PLEX DVR - questions - is it me or PLEX?

[abreuma677_gmail_com]

Running PLEX in a Docker on Unraid. Keep everthing updated. Front end is primarily a Roku. Ripping my DVD & music to it worked great. Recently added an antenna & HDHomerun and now I’m wondering if this is the right way to do over-the-air (OTA) content?

While watching recorded OTA content, if I fast-forward (scrub) I don’t see video, so it’s impossible to know when to stop the fast-forward. I know commercial skip could help (I’ll get to that next), but there are times when I scrub content, like during racing events. Commercial skip won’t help there. Am I doing something wrong or is this “the way it is” with PLEX?

I enabled commercial skip. My wife watches recorded national news every evening. Commercial skip fails with this show. The first 15 or so minutes are news before the first commercial. The skip ads button appears and when pressed the show’s over. PLEX is marking the entire second half of the content as a commercial. This news show does do hokey stuff. Like I said, the first 15 minutes are news, then they pack in the commercials with short news segments for the last 15 minutes. Seems the default commercial skip tuning doesn’t work for this show format.

I’ve read about comskip.ini. What I need is a comskip.ini for each show we record, since the tuning could be different. However I haven’t even figured out how to place a custom comskip.ini in my specific setup (Docker on Unraid) to see if I can solve the news show problem. Do I have useful options here or is this just the way PLEX works?

Looking at logs, it appears that once the commercial skip algorithm has run on a specific show, it won’t run again since there are already commerical markers present. I know I can “analyze” a show again, but I really need to be able to remove the commercial markers so the algorithm could be run again using a better comskip.ini. Is this possible?

[hokierulz]

I don’t run in docker, so hopefully someone else can chip in with specifics. What I can say is that I saw significant benefit from a custom comskip.ini over the default.

You have to turn on video preview thumbnails to be able to see anything while scrubbing. Be aware of the extra processing time and disk space needed for the preview thumnails. I ended up turning it off because Plex doesn’t put the generated thumbnails in the library’s location. By default it puts those in your Plex appdata location. I think you can move this, but I’ve also seen reports that thumbnail preview performance is bad if not on a SSD, so you may need to experiment with your specific setup.

Edit: With Roku each time you click the left or right on the “plus” button it jumps 10 seconds, so if comskip didn’t work I can usually skip through a specific amount of commercial time pretty accurately.