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:
After reading the comments above by bmfb1980, I decided to give it another try. I tested with some programs that have markers - a show episode and a movie I recorded from an ad-supported streaming service. It removed the ads as expected. The only issue I had was figuring out how to preserve the captions, which were missing from the first video I tested. I found some posts in this forum that showed me what settings to use in the Advanced and Expert settings, and after running one of the videos through the app again the captions were there. It seems strange that the default setup wouldn’t preserve captions, but it does work with the correct settings, which is what matters.
Now that I know the app works for videos with markers, I plan to buy it before my trial expires.
This is good feedback. One of the reason why the option to embed chapters and subtitles has been disabled by default is because many devices don’t support it which causes the video not to play. With the latest 2.6.2 beta version embedding subtitles is enabled by default as most modern devices support embedded subtitles - but there are still many devices which don’t support embedded chapters.
Thanks for the explanation. I’ve tested several videos now and it has worked flawlessly for all of them. The earlier test I had problems with was a recording from an external capture device, so there were no markers for the ad breaks. For streaming videos with unskippable ads, this is a terrific tool and well worth the cost of a license.