Starting version 2.6.4 MCEBuddy now includes a custom donator build of Comskip with 8K hardware acceleration and support for native decoding of additional file formats (including MPEG2, H.264, HEVC, AV1, VP8, VP9 etc).
These instructions apply if you want to install/use a custom version of Comskip.
These instructions apply to the Premium Access version of MCEBuddy. Use the following procedure to setup MCEBuddy to use an alternative version Comskip:
OPTION 1
Extract ALL the Comskip files (including .INI and all other files) from the Comskip zip archive into a directory (e.g. C:\Comskip)
Open MCEBuddy Settings → General Settings → System Settings
Click on the … next to Comskip path
Select the comskip.exe from your Comskip directory e.g. C:\Comskip\comskip.exe
NOTE: If you don’t extract ALL the files comskip will not work. It needs all the files included in the zip archive.
It is preferable to follow OPTION 1 instructions, these settings will be preserved/carried over when you upgrade or reinstall MCEBuddy
OPTION 2
Alternative you can extract all the files from the Comskip zip archive to the MCEBuddy Installation directory into the Comskip folder (replace all the files).
NOTE: With this option, when you upgrade MCEBuddy or reinstall MCEBuddy it will overwrite this folder with the default version of bundled Comskip.
How can you tell if comskip is using Hardware acceleration. I have both MCEbuddy 2.4.8 and comskip82_003_donators i have enabled HW acc in the comskip.ini. I see no difference setting hardware_decode=0 or hardware_decode=1 in time usage and GPU-z does not show any activity on my Geforce 1070 card during comskip. But the re-encoding through MCEbuddy and FFmpeg runs fine using the h264_nvenc encoder.
Depends on many factors. Most importantly if your source video is not h.264 likely your performance gain will be negligible that you may not notice it.
To really tell you shouldn’t increase the Logging level of Comskip and see if it’s using hardware decoding.
Hardware decoding only speeds up commercial detection. If you’re using the latest build of MCEBuddy 2.6.4 or newer then it has everything you need for hardware decoding to speed up commercial detection. See this topic for more details about it
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,
Would upgrading do anything to help this? or
Would tweaking comskip.ini suffice?
Thanks for all you do, we do enjoy our LRPC (Living Room PC)!
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.
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.
