Expectations for mpeg2 commercial removal

I’m debating getting the donator version of mcebuddy. As there’s no way to try the new version prior to donating - I thought I would ask here. Currently I’m using avidemux to remove commercials from my wife’s daily chat/cooking shows recorded OTA. It takes me about 5 minutes to remove the commercials from each show and then I just drop the file into my Plex library and let Plex convert it to h.264 for easy streaming to the Roku. I was thinking about a more automatic solution and would certainly sacrifice some time in exchange for not having to do it manually. I know that the older version of mcebuddy has a restriction on speed - but I’m curious if the donator version is a noticeable improvement for standard OTA mpeg2 HD content. I read that if the source is h.264 there is a big difference, but some references on the site also mention ‘HD’. If I got the old version to test against - is there a big difference in speed when using it on standard mpeg2 transport stream files recorded OTA? Or is the h.264 part what really changes things? For those mpeg2 recordingd, would I still be looking at nearly an hour of detection/removal for an hour-long program?

You’re touching up on many topics in a single question. Let me try to address a few:

  1. The new versions have over 500 new features and bug fixes
  2. There biggest speed improvements are when hardware encoding is used and Unprocessed profiles are used, the mpeg2 encoder will show a small (20-40% improvement in speed), h264 more and highest for unprocessed and hardware encoding (1000%-2000%)

The actual speed depends upon your profile, hardware setup and what activities you’re doing. An hour long show can be converted in 5 minutes or it can take an hour depending up on your hardware, profile and overall activities setup. (are you using a NAS, a SSD drive etc). So it’s hard to give a blanket answer, one can only provide comparison e.g. 2.3.13 on setup X vs 2.4.8 with Setup X

You could look at it from a purely economic view.

How much time do you want to spend mulling over a $12 ($1/month) or a $25/yr decision? There is no obligation to renew if you’re really that tight in your budget, so think of it as a one-time cost in that case.

Either it is worth it (for the reasons above) or it isn’t. I think it’s worth it, particularly as I use it with the still evolving HD Homerun devices, so updates to fix bugs and use new features are important to me.

Mike, what are you talking about here? Although it’s nice if people contribute to MCEBuddy on a recurring basis I haven’t seen anywhere where MCEBUDDY is a subscription service. A donation of $30 or more is what I see.

Thanks all for the responses. I guess I was more looking for a general analysis of commercial detection performance. Right now - it’s a 5 minute manual process for me and then I let Plex convert in the background. That’s all fine for the handful of daily shows my wife has - but it is still a manual process. I was just curious if commercial detection and removal has average benchmarks where I could use, say, an older i3 laptop that would detect commercials and simply write the mpeg2 file to disk. An auto process that perhaps took 10 minutes may be worth it to replace my 5 minute manual process. I would probably still just let Plex handle the conversion to mpeg4 as it seems to work twice as fast as when I have Handbrake do it. About 30-40 minutes in Plex vs almost an hour with Handbrake.

I, too, throught the $30 donation is what is necessary. I see the donation dropdown in the top-right, but I thought that was a separate thing than the donation for premium?

I hesitated but glad I got MCEBuddy. It monitors the folders and does all the work. I don’t see why an older i3 laptop wouldn’t do the job for you. Things sped up for me when I got the donators version of Comskip too.

My PVR is on one computer and MCEBuddy is on another computer that monitors the folders through a network share.

For us, the main benefit is no matter what device we used, getting them to a universal codec gives us speed and less of a burden on the pvr serving them and the devices using them. In others words for us it makes sense to convert them once instead of on the fly everytime they are watched. Less writing to the hard drives too. (assuming Plex transcodes on the fly as you watch and throws it away afterwards.)

That’s the options on the mcebuddy2x.com website. Maybe the site text says something different than the donate checkout.

Yeah, it’s $30.00 to get the PREMIUM ACCESS PROGRAM with a (feel free to donate more to continue supporting the development.)

Ok. I’ve been a paid user since it started. Weird that the $30 Early access option isn’t on the dropdown. Or a note if that is what you’re looking for you kyst use the other link on the page.

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It’s definitely worth the money plus extra donations if one is able.

Cutting commercials and conversion aside, I like it brings down the data, writes it in the video making it easier to navigate, organize, etc with the metadata part of the video.

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Just re-upped my Early Access payment. The site has some options for monthly/yearly payments, and the early access button is a one-time pre-populated with the $30 amount. I didn’t see options to “pay what you want”, but it could have been buried in the PayPal.

One way with the paypal “invoice” to allow higher donations to be accepted might be to add a second line item of $0 that the user/purchaser can change and the fixed $30 EA amount.

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