I tested MCEbuddy on a movie with a running time of 1 hour 50 minutes. After running the program, some of the commercials were still there and the resulting file had a running time of 1 hour 44 minutes. In other words, some of the commercials are still there and some of the movie has been removed. Not what I was hoping for.
Now I’m trying to uninstall the program using the Windows 11 Control Panel, but I get an error indicating it can’t be uninstalled because another installation is running. Same result after a reboot. As far as I can tell, there is nothing else installing. I have also stopped and disabled the service for MCEbuddy, but it made no difference in being able to uninstall. I’m a little concerned about leaving this program on my PC.
I’d be curious which movie and provider (stream or OTA). Perhaps if I list were maintained, a pattern would emerge that would allow better detection. I’ve converted about 2500-3000 files in bulk so far and though I’ve not watched any of the results other than spot-checking, it seems to work for me.
I learned about “marking” commercials, and also about detecting “black zones” which indicate commercials. Some OTA content is not perfectly detected for me, but streams seem to be perfect as the are “marked” in the file and the software sees the mark very easily.
AFAIK the commercial detection is highly dependent on the program you’re using to detect commercials (comskip or showanalyzer) and also on the channel. I use comskip and have had to make custom INI files for channels to improve detection accuracy in some cases. This may also help