So, I am trying the ‘Plex Dance’ on one show to see if the maintenance window will run commskip on the imported tv show.
So far I have not see the maintenance window perform commercial processing on tv shows that are imported. All recorded shows inside Plex perform commercial processing.
Same here. I’ve had it running for 3 days and nothing that I’ve recorded outside of Plex is getting tagged. I get “skip intro” added, but no commercial markings.
So, I can confirm that the “Plex Commercial Skipper” did run last night during the maintenance window. I don’t know the selection criteria or order. But the show I did the “Plex Dance” did not get in the queue during last night’s maintenance window.
I guess if you have a lot of imports it will take awhile before the maintenance widow tasks catch up. My maintenance window is between 11pm to 7am and it processed about 30 movies during that timeframe.
Before my maintenance window I turned on verbose logging and ran a command in the terminal window to watch for events. My Plex Media Server is running on a Mac. If you are on windows I think you can use a PowerShell Command to watch a file and look for keywords to filter output.
tail -F Plex\ Media\ Server.log | grep "Plex Commercial Skipper"
I wanted to provide some information on the commercial skipper issue. For a while now I too have been seeing issues with the Plex Commercial Skipper and talking with one of the Devs concerning what I was seeing. We looked at logs and my database to try to find issues. One of the things I saw, and I don’t remember exactly when I noticed this, was that several shows were being scanned over several different nights. I have also seen a case where commercial markers were present and then disappeared later which caused me to look at the processing of the files. I was using mcebuddy so quit having mcebuddy process the files and created a post-processing script.
As part of the debugging process, I have run a couple of different experimental builds, the last one with verbose logging so we could get enough information around the issue. I am now running another experimental build with some fixes for us to look at the problem further. I have provided the Dev more logs and another copy of the database in the past day as we try to track down the issue and ensure it is working as intended. With the holidays approaching the current plan is to continue testing this experimental build and continue communication with the hopes of getting a new beta build early next year with the fixes in place for commercial markings to work better at recording time and during Scheduled Tasks.
I can see mine populating now too. It appears to get through about 12 - 1 hour episodes per 6 hour maintenance period. Yea…this is gonna take awhile. 
I have noticed that the commercial and intro skipper works fine on a roku player but does not appear on my lg tv app. Is this normal? Has the feature not been added to lg-webos yet?
Is there a way to activate the commercial detection on TV libraries without going through DVR set up? I have shows from other DVR sources but I don’t have a tuner on the same network as my Plex server so I can’t get past the initial set up to tell Plex to activate ad detection.
That’s interesting, I have a similar issue - and have had to turn off Intro detection because of it.
Intro detection would run each night and everything would be fine, then the activity circle would get to about 98% and stick on “Detecting Intros for Most Haunted S26”, at which point not just Plex but the entire server would become unresponsive, no SSH, no web interface, no Samba - essentially the server was offline. It’s running in a VM - so I would check Xencenter which would show no disk activity, no network and no CPU use. It would remain unresponsive for anything from 6 to 24 hours.
When it eventually came back and I looked at the logs, it was mostly Plex complaining that it couldn’t connect to the auth server, the metadata server or even the local server. It appears as though Plex essentially got stuck in some sort of loop and exhausted all the available network sockets, so no network communication was possible until it gave up and eventually the sockets timed out and became available to the system again. Once it had recovered - it would continue to work as if nothing had happened.
There is nothing different about the files it gets stuck on, and temporarily removing them, doesn’t fix anything - it just sticks on another file - which it had previously already processed.
I have several thousand TV shows in my PMS library that were recorded using BeyondTV and have the commercials already marked from having run through comskip when they were originally recorded. There’s an xml file for each recording, and they look like this:
<cutlist>
<Region><start comment="0:04:43.98">2839837000</start><end comment="0:05:14.51">3145142000</end></Region>
<Region><start comment="0:15:08.34">9083407667</start><end comment="0:19:18.85">11588577000</end></Region>
<Region><start comment="0:26:34.85">15948599333</start><end comment="0:28:45.49">17254904333</end></Region>
<Region><start comment="0:31:03.26">18632614000</start><end comment="0:31:57.24">19172486667</end></Region>
</cutlist>
Is there a way to import these xml’s into PMS? Or can the Plex player be made to recognize the existing xml’s and use them?
No, it has to do its own analysis, you can’t import anything for it.
I have the skip ads popup in a browser, but it does not appear on my main Plex app (LG), or my backup (Xbox). So I know it is configured correctly since it works in a browser, does that mean the feature is not yet supported in the LG or Xbox apps? Will it be added?
Should I make a new topic with this question?
Ad skip isn’t supported for those clients, yet; see “Player App Support for Skipping Commercials” in this article:
Ah, I will keep my eye on that for updates, thank you for replying!
Where is the data stored for the commercial skipping? I have multiple servers recording different programs, but us the same data on a NAS. It would be awesome for the commercial data to be stored in some kind of file next to the recordings. It would also make the data recoverable in the event the server has to be rebuilt.
This appears to be stored in the database, which isn’t immediately useful for your need. You can see the non-destructive commercial skip markers for a show if you click on an episode, select “Get Info”, and then click on “View XML”. The commercial skip data is the “Marker” tag, type “commercial”. (Intros are similarly marked, but type “intro”.)
does renaming the folder that houses your dvr recordings mess with the commercial skipper? that’s the only thing i can thing of that i have done. changed the folder from ‘dvr’ to ‘1dvr’ so it’s at the top of the media folder and now all the shows i recorded with plex pass and that were skipping commercials perfectly suddenly can’t. i used this thread and learned about the xml file and it shows they no longer have markings for commercials while newer recordings after the folder name change have the markings again. is there a way to force plex to re-check the previous files? in the advanced area of my tv show tab, i changed it from ‘recorded items’ to ‘all items’ because it hasn’t rechecked them during maintenance with the former so why not try the latter?
edit: ya that did the trick
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