@bmslynch said:
Any word on this feature being available on Nvidia Shield? I was just starting the process of moving my main household Plex install away from a desktop to the Shield, but if doing so will cause me to lose access to this very attractive feature, I may rethink my strategy.
It’s out for the Shield - I’ve installed but haven’t tested yet.
How does it handle more then one show ending at the same time? Will PleX queue the shows for commercial removal?
@yooshaw said:
@bmslynch said:
Any word on this feature being available on Nvidia Shield? I was just starting the process of moving my main household Plex install away from a desktop to the Shield, but if doing so will cause me to lose access to this very attractive feature, I may rethink my strategy.It’s out for the Shield - I’ve installed but haven’t tested yet.
My fault - when I was reading the comments about how to edit the comskip.ini file for customization purposes, it specifically laid out instructions for Mac/Windows/Linux. I assumed that commercial skip capabilities were only rolling out to those platforms and excluding the Shield based off of that info. I also wondered how the Plex server running on Shield would have access to comskip in general since that’s what is being used in the background (but maybe I’m just not understanding fully how that’s done and how it would get baked into the backend of Plex Server/Shield). If you are willing please report back to the forum on how your testing goes with commercial skipping on the Shield. I took a chance on a Black Friday Deal on the HDHomeRun Connect Quatro - if the early returns on Shield DVR commercial skip seem promising, I’m going to make it my go-to setup.
I’m seeing about 7x performance with commercial removal on a headless i7-7567U (so a hair under 4 minutes per half hour), and so far, the results have been fantastic. The channels commercial removal has occurred for have been fairly limited so far, so take my review with a grain of salt. The two most critical additions, in my opinion, are the ability to mark chapters rather than cut them, and to allow a per-channel/program comskip.ini. I used to do this with my own post-processing script, and I was extracting the program name and mapping it to a per-channel configuration, which was more than sufficient for the handful of programs we record.
All this said, I’d very much prefer to let Plex do this for me. Has going down this road brought about any discussion of bringing back post-process remux to MKV, @kinoCharlino? Most people are of the opinion that the TS container is problematic for some devices that support it in regard to audio sync, but what I’ve found is that re-encoding the audio to AAC from AC3 causes ffmpeg to drop the bad audio blocks and re-align the audio, so re-mux to MKV built-in saves me a lot of headache.
Any idea when this will be supported under FreeBSD? Got all excited about it and wanted to try it but can’t cause of this. Seems like such a bummer given how popular Plex and FreeNAS are. So close but yet so far…
@Anijake said:
How does it handle more then one show ending at the same time? Will PleX queue the shows for commercial removal?
We queue them up and process one-at-a-time.
@fecaleagle said:
Has going down this road brought about any discussion of bringing back post-process remux to MKV, @kinoCharlino? Most people are of the opinion that the TS container is problematic for some devices that support it in regard to audio sync, but what I’ve found is that re-encoding the audio to AAC from AC3 causes ffmpeg to drop the bad audio blocks and re-align the audio, so re-mux to MKV built-in saves me a lot of headache.
I don’t see us going back to MKV in the foreseeable future, mostly because of the issues surrounding mpeg2 in MKV and closed captioning support.
@Spunky03 said:
Any idea when this will be supported under FreeBSD?
Yes we do plan to bring support to FreeBSD, though I don’t have a timeframe to share at this time. You have a workaround for now, though, to use 3rd party comskip.
@kinoCharlino said:
I don’t see us going back to MKV in the foreseeable future, mostly because of the issues surrounding mpeg2 in MKV and closed captioning support.
I definitely remember reading about the issues with CC and MKV containters; but what are the MPEG2 issues?
@rwhapham said:
I definitely remember reading about the issues with CC and MKV containters; but what are the MPEG2 issues?
I’m not the expert at this, but from what I understand engineering ran into a variety of playback and seeking issues.
I just want to say a big THANK YOU to Plex for this feature. I was doing this with MCEBuddy and it’s not a huge deal but when I can simply flick a button and not have something extra to setup when it comes time for the next hardware upgrade, windows upgrade, etc. and I have one less thing to have to setup.
I used this last night for (2) 30 minute programs and (1) 60 minute show on CBS it worked flawlessly with a 2 minute before and after pad as stated by someone else earlier in this thread. Now where it failed was Street Outlaws on Discovery it would miss commercials entirely or break in the middle of a commercial break. This is in my comskip tuning I’m sure but it works for me over the alternative of skipping commercials.
AGain a HUGE at a boy to Plex!
@d00msay3r3 said:
I just want to say a big THANK YOU to Plex for this feature. I was doing this with MCEBuddy and it’s not a huge deal but when I can simply flick a button and not have something extra to setup when it comes time for the next hardware upgrade, windows upgrade, etc. and I have one less thing to have to setup.
I used this last night for (2) 30 minute programs and (1) 60 minute show on CBS it worked flawlessly with a 2 minute before and after pad as stated by someone else earlier in this thread. Now where it failed was Street Outlaws on Discovery it would miss commercials entirely or break in the middle of a commercial break. This is in my comskip tuning I’m sure but it works for me over the alternative of skipping commercials.
AGain a HUGE at a boy to Plex!
Thank you for the kind words and the report of your experience. I passed this along to engineering, thinking it might be good for them to see that! 
Commercial removal so far flawless with my dvr shows. Should really help with MST3K weekend recordings, because dang they really stuff that show with commercials on comet. I was getting pretty frustrated early last week but now going on a week of stability with recordings also. Average 2-3 shows a night, plenty with 2 or 3 at once.
I think the stability improvements have really helped for the windows version + Hauppauge quadhd pci express card combination. I have good signal with a 2nd floor window winegard flatwave powered antenna 18 miles from the Milwaukee tower cluster. This is also with the “experimental” transcode being turned on in the tuner settings in plex - having that on coincides with less issues or its placebo - but not worse. Cut the cord (actually maybe should be called “sliced the dish”?) about 2 weeks ago by going to slingtv and plex for OTA networks.
@bmslynch said:
@yooshaw said:
@bmslynch said:
Any word on this feature being available on Nvidia Shield? I was just starting the process of moving my main household Plex install away from a desktop to the Shield, but if doing so will cause me to lose access to this very attractive feature, I may rethink my strategy.It’s out for the Shield - I’ve installed but haven’t tested yet.
My fault - when I was reading the comments about how to edit the comskip.ini file for customization purposes, it specifically laid out instructions for Mac/Windows/Linux. I assumed that commercial skip capabilities were only rolling out to those platforms and excluding the Shield based off of that info. I also wondered how the Plex server running on Shield would have access to comskip in general since that’s what is being used in the background (but maybe I’m just not understanding fully how that’s done and how it would get baked into the backend of Plex Server/Shield). If you are willing please report back to the forum on how your testing goes with commercial skipping on the Shield. I took a chance on a Black Friday Deal on the HDHomeRun Connect Quatro - if the early returns on Shield DVR commercial skip seem promising, I’m going to make it my go-to setup.
I started a thread over in the Shield PMS forum:
https://forums.plex.tv/discussion/297619/commercial-skipping-on-the-shield#latest
I am running the linux version of Plex on my Dell i7-3770, with no issues. I recorded Moonshiners, a 60 min show on Discovery channel and after the commercials were cut out it went to 40 mins. It took 5 minutes to post process the 60 min show on my system and cut out the commercials. I watched the episode and it was great, you can see about 1 second of the commercial (which I like… cause you know it was cut correctly) then start of the show where it should be. I FF through the same show on the cable box DVR to verify I missed nothing and PLEX cut it correctly. I tested 2 other shows, same experience, a blip of the commercial and then cut, then back to the show.
One minor issue - on most of the Discovery shows at about the 52ish mark there is always a block of about 3 minute commercials then 45 mins of the show then another 3 mins of commercials then the final 4-5 mins of the show… Plex cut out the 45 seconds in the middle of the 2 commercial blocks. That 45 secs is usually some non topical part of the current show and I usually blow past it but I thought I would mention it… this bug might be hiding other issues for other shows.
Overall … well done… this is so much better than playing with the remote and trying to FF and the REV thru the show… thanks PLEX !!!
haeffnkr
@kinoCharlino said:
@Spunky03 said:
Any idea when this will be supported under FreeBSD?Yes we do plan to bring support to FreeBSD, though I don’t have a timeframe to share at this time. You have a workaround for now, though, to use 3rd party comskip.
Thanks Kino for the response. Just curious about when. Been wanting stuff like this for sometime so I can ditch my Tablo and run pure Plex.
yes, have a workaround but it’s kludgy and complicated. Just hoping for the all integrated holy grail.
Again, thanks for the response!
@fecaleagle said:
Most people are of the opinion that the TS container is problematic for some devices that support it in regard to audio sync, but what I’ve found is that re-encoding the audio to AAC from AC3 causes ffmpeg to drop the bad audio blocks and re-align the audio, so re-mux to MKV built-in saves me a lot of headache.
You can certainly do this via Post Processing script functionality that is built it. Let Plex comskip it for you then call the post process script that does your additional magic.
I post process my files adding an AAC track, converting to H.264 if needed, de-interlacing if interlaced, etc
Carlo
@kinoCharlino said:
@rwhapham said:
I definitely remember reading about the issues with CC and MKV containters; but what are the MPEG2 issues?I’m not the expert at this, but from what I understand engineering ran into a variety of playback and seeking issues.
I’m curious about the issues with MKV containers as I never had any issues with MKVs when Plex DVR was using them. With TS however, skip forward/back takes 10 seconds. Completely unusable. Only fix is to disable direct play which I’ve done permanently for now. At a minimum it would be nice if we could have the option to use mkv. That would be better than the current solution where we’re forced to use TS.
@cayars said:
You can certainly do this via Post Processing script functionality that is built it. Let Plex comskip it for you then call the post process script that does your additional magic.
This is what I do. I only mentioned it, because it didn’t use to be necessary for me when “remux to mkv” was a built-in, and I acknowledge that some people in the same boat would be liable to have trouble writing/adapting a post-processing script and discovering what it would need to accomplish. Rather, they might just assume that Plex DVR “sucks”. Audio sync is notoriously problematic with Live TV and DVR Recordings on the Sony Android TVs when using the original streams captured off of an HDHR. The same problem is evident when I do a direct capture off of the HDHR, so this is not Plex’ responsibility, but having the ability to remux built-in was a simple and sufficient workaround. Sorry for getting us off-topic. That’ll do. 
One of the major issues with MKV is that it’s very hard to use for LiveTV. The TS format is perfect for this.
@cayars said:
One of the major issues with MKV is that it’s very hard to use for LiveTV. The TS format is perfect for this.
It’s perfect to use for clients that support it and support it well, but when it hits a bad audio block on an insufficient player (mostly due to signal drop), the audio will fall out of sync. For my primary clients, the remux to mkv option was a godsend. I understand the additional requirements on development to support both, but it would be a tremendous help for this to return (defaulted to off and with a disclaimer about CC).
EDIT: Again, the container is not really the issue for me, remuxing to MKV with a straight A/V copy does not address the issue. Likewise, transcoding the audio to AAC and sticking it back in a TS also addresses the problem. The audio re-encode is what re-aligns the time signatures of the blocks and drops the bad ones. Remux to MKV doesn’t describe the full benefit of the option, because the live audio re-encode was what really made the capture reliable.
Sorry, I swear I’m done on this subject in this thread. It’s been quite a headache for me and has jeopardized the switch from cable to Plex OTA with my wife. I think we’re on solid enough ground with a post-process remux, but having to skip back ten seconds fifteen seconds after sync loss during Live TV viewing to realign things is still a daily annoyance that was entirely mitigated by the remux to mkv option.
@fecaleagle said:
@cayars said:
One of the major issues with MKV is that it’s very hard to use for LiveTV. The TS format is perfect for this.It’s perfect to use for clients that support it and support it well, but when it hits a bad audio block on an insufficient player (mostly due to signal drop), the audio will fall out of sync.
(cough… Plex Windows Store app… cough…)
