Monthly Archives: February 2009

Commercial Skipping: Updated

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Last week I talked about how I moved away from Lifextender and moved back to DTB and started using Show Analyzer for Commercial detection. Well take that all back, sort of. I am still using Show Analyzer for commercial detection, however I am back to using lifextender as I have found it to be more user friendly and less resource intensive during my prime time TV viewing hours, of 7pm to 10pm.

I found that my CPU usage was getting excessively high, and that playback from time to time was lagging and juttery, well I found that one too many instances of DTB were running and causing the slow downs. I tried to find a way to only process the recorded tv shows, say at 1am, but I honestly couldn’t find anything for DTB to allow me to do that. So reluctantly I went back to using Lifextender as I can set it to run at 1am while nothing is being recorded, and no one is using the pc.

This time I am using Show Analyzer with Lifextender which so far has done a much better job of commercial detecting over comskip. If anyone has a way of setting DTB to only process shows at a given time (1am) so that the next day when the PC is used again, I can still get the commercial skipping as needed.

As always follow me on twitter or register here and comment away.

 

- Josh

Commercial Skipping and How much do you have recorded?

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I recently was having issues with Lifextedner, well mostly Comskip not detecting commercials correctly and because of how Lifextender works, it fully removes the commercials from the recorded TV file. That is great if you want to save space, but when Comskip, the plugin that actually does the commercial detecting isn’t doing the job correctly you start to loose faith in the whole setup. I remembered I purchased Show Analyzer years ago when I was using DVRMSToolBox (DTB), but I was having issues with DTB over loading the CPU on my old HTPC, so I switched to Lifextender. I tried to get Show Analyzer to work with LE but to no avail, so a few days ago I switched back to DTB.

I got DTB set back up, got Show Analyzer re-installed and configured, and away I went. The problem was I have a ton of recorded tv shows, basically archived for when summer comes along so we have something to watch when our regular tv shows are over with, and also something to watch when our new baby arrives. Well with the large amount of recorded tv shows I had to re-scan all of the tv shows so that I could get the .xml tags needed to skip the commercials for all the tv shows.

It has been two days now and I am only half way through the 1.1TB of recorded TV shows I have on my main VMC system. As I already posted earlier this month, I have a 500gig OS drive, 500gig and a 1TB hdd for recorded tv.  So that comes to the second point of the blog post. How many hard drives do you have in your HTPC? How large are they? and how much recorded tv do you have? if you average that each recording is about 8gigs per hour, I have roughly 146hrs of recorded tv, which is shared between my wife’s shows, my daughters cartoons, and of course my shows.

So what are you doing for commercial skipping, if at all, and how much tv do you have recorded on your Media Center PC? As always you can follow me on Twitter, and or register here and add your comments.

 

- Josh