Why does PMS run "Plex Commercial Skipper.exe" randomly for hours at night?

Plex Media Server
1

There are many times in the middle of the night where I will see my CPU usage ramped up, and it is due to Plex Commercial Skipper.exe actively running. If I terminate Plex Commercial Skipper.exe, or reboot my PC, many times Plex Commercial Skipper.exe will automatically start back up again. It may run for many hours (over 24 hours, sometimes) before terminating.

Why is PCS running? Nothing is being recorded at these odd times.

Thanks,

AzJazz

Server Version#: 1.23.2.4656
Player Version#: N/A

2

You can tell Plex to also analyze videos for ad breaks, which were not recorded by the Plex DVR.

The preference to switch that off is in the properties of a library, on the “Advanced” tab.

During the night is the default time period for server maintenance, which is when this analysis is taking place (among many other things). Scheduled Tasks | Plex Support

Maybe you can schedule it differently? So it doesn’t co-incide with your sleeping time. (Switching off all scheduled tasks is a bad idea.)

3

Thanks, @OttoKerner! That looked promising. However, when I looked at the settings for my 2 libraries (Movies and TV Shows), I saw that the Ad Detection was only enabled for Recorded Items in both. I would think that Plex doesn’t rescan the recorded files again once they have been scanned … maybe I’m wrong about that.

Also, the activity time is currently set for 2:00 AM to 5:00 AM, and there are many times where I see PCS running outside those hours.

AzJazz

4

Is it possible that your server is sometimes losing access to the media storage?
This can happen if:

  • the media are on an external USB drive with aggressive power saving behaviour
  • the media are on a network share/NAS which some times isn’t available. Either due to the network connection being unreliable or because the NAS is in power saving mode from where it doesn’t wake up fast enough when Plex is trying to access a file
  • you are juggling with external USB drives and remove them temporarily to get a free port for another external drive etc.

Another reason could be a library where all movies are stored together in one big folder (i.e. not subfolder for each movie). This can lead to frequent library rescans and automatich matching/re-matching which then can make ad-detection invalid.

5

If no commercials are found, it will retry every night during the scheduled task window. It fails to find commercials regularly when the station runs a special weather/news alert logo in top left so after a while you will end up with a lot of shows in the queue. I either delete the episode or Plex Dance it so it quits looking for it and just do without the comskip.

DVR Commercial skipper is re run for shows which have had Ads stripped already
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