Getting Started Issues

General Support / Questions Commercial Removal
1

Greetings All!

I am in need of some assistance. I am definitely not new to MCEBuddy, as I have been a paid donator to it since the early days of Windows MCE.

I am currently using Plex, and after discovering their own commercial detection/removal is horribly broken, I turned it off and thought I would leverage MCEBuddy against it’s recordings in much the same way I did with MCE.

I am a Charter Spectrum subscriber here in the US, and I can’t seem to get much to work in the way of commercial removal with either Comskip or ShowAnalyzer. I was also a paid donator to ShowAnalyzer, but I understand it has been long since deprecated. Is it even useful anymore?

I also donated to Comskip, but I see the latest (paid) version was released last December. Is there something newer I should be using?

I realize my comskip.ini may need some tweaking, and I looked around for profiles, but I can’t seem to find much that applies to my locale (midwest US Charter). Do I need to make my own? Do I really need one tuned per channel??

Thanks, just confused as years ago I had really good success with ShowAnalyzer and no tweaking to speak of. I would have thought things would have gotten better and even easier in the years since, but I guess not.

Thanks, any tips would be greatly appreciated!

-Rob

2

Unfortunately, there hasn’t been a ton of movement or improvement in the Comskip space. I’m always surprised that the ini-s the community has provided are years old, and the community isn’t very active.

What I would do is download several of the US ones (I don’t know why cable is separate from OTA), and then just test them on several recordings. One of the main reasons I got MCEBuddy was for it’s Archiving feature. Use an Unprocessed profile, test manually using files from the Archive folder, change the ini file, repeat.

You can certainly dig deeper, but a)the documentation isn’t good and b) it’ll never be perfect. I’ve found even it will inexplicably cut the same show/channel slightly differently (like 2 frames early after the theme). I’ve tried to understand the Comskip log files (you’ll need some profile tweaking to expose) to a limited success, but there’s still a lot I don’t get. I use the exclude/include feature in MCE to make sure certain shows use certain ini files, and others use the default.