Adjusting comskip detection - sporadic

General Support / Questions Commercial Removal
1

I’m a longtime user of MCEBuddy, and I’ve been running on version 2.5.6.1 for a long time, with good luck on earlier versions as well.
Everything seems to work well, so I don’t have a reason to update, EXCEPT:
My comskip is sporadic. Sometimes it doesn’t remove the commercial (that’s not a major problem), but many times it cuts off the end of the show (my wife hates this).
My questions are,

  1. Would upgrading do anything to help this? or
  2. Would tweaking comskip.ini suffice?
    Thanks for all you do, we do enjoy our LRPC (Living Room PC)!
2

Tweaking comskip.ini can help, however, the challenge is that the specific tweaks are for specific kinds of “glitches” in the way ads are injected into media streams. For example, there are ads that are injected intermittently as banners at the top or bottom of the content. Sometimes the content is “squished” and other times the content is simply covered by the ad banner, meaning to fix it you have to transform the video instead of cropping it or the other way around.

Then there are ads that slide in and act like logos in the various corners of the screen, sometimes moving around within the same content. Then there are the crawlers, like news tickers or weather alerts. Sometimes at the top of the screen.

Then there used to be a specific signal embedded into the streams that are intended to trigger the broadcasting company to insert an ad. However, it is simple for ad-blockers and comskip to do the same and remove the ads. So they got smarter and inject the ads without signalling.

Now, we have AI injecting ads arbitrarily in content streams based on when they think most people are watching, and not at scheduled time points in the content.

So the choice pretty much boils down to investing the time and effort to figure out the exact tweaks to remove the specific ads for the specific content you are processing with a custom comskip.ini file and then setting up individual profiles and tasks in MCE Buddy to select and use the specific comskip.ini for that content, … or just living with the idea that this is as good as it will get for the effort you are putting into it.

Sorry to not have a better answer.

3

You can tweak the comskip ini to make it less aggressive. You can start very simply by using the Comskip INI editor included and change the detect_method and to use less aggressive methods and enable things like Logo detection if you know that you shows always have a logo in them.