OTA - PBS Shows

General Support / Questions Commercial Removal
1

Hello all. My first post here, so be gentle if I accidentally break any rules or etiquette. :wink: I am a true Cable Cutter with only OTA and Web content. Right now, I only DVR OTA content and mostly PBS shows. The content is Recorded on a Windows 7 Media Center PC. MCEBuddy is installed on a separate 8-Core ā€œProcessingā€ PC and monitors the .WTV files from the MCE PC. After MCEBuddy finishes, it transfers the MP4 file(s) to my 92TB Media Server for viewing. Everything works beautifully, which is another reason why I do not want to leave Windows 7.

Here in SoCal, I am within range of 4 major OTA content Markets, so there is a lot of good choices for me since I am mostly a Documentary Junkie. PBS doesnā€™t run any Third Party Ads per seā€™ ā€¦ BUT they do advertise THEMSELVES quite a lot - to the point of nausea really. And they are all exactly the same - asking for Money. These ā€œMoney-Begā€ Ads (as I call them) are incredibly Long, running anywhere from 3 to 12 minutes in length. And they run them without regard to whether the viewer has already signed up as an ongoing ā€œSupporterā€ or not. If you watch a lot of PBS as I do, this gets really annoying after a period of time. Comskip does not recognize these Money-Beg segments as Ads.

My question: is there anything I can do to force Comskip to recognize them as Ads and cut them out of the MP4? Actually, I am hoping that someone has already done this and might be willing to share their custom INI file with me. I have no idea as to how to custom modify a Comskip INI file. I am mostly a Hardware guy.

Thanks in advance for whatever help anyone may be able to provide,
GDog

2

So itā€™s been 3 days and 18 views and not a single comment? Am I completely alone in a quest such as this? Has no one else ever wanted to do this? Did I do something wrong, something offensive or break some kind of rule or etiquette? Or is there just not that much traffic here anymore? Sheesh!

3

Well, I have to say Iā€™m getting a bit discouraged here. 8 days and 25 Views without a single Reply. Am I supposed to just declare this place a DEAD Forum and look elsewhere? Problem is, I donā€™t know where else to look! If there is a better place to go to get some help would someone please let me know where that is? Iā€™d really appreciate that. Thanks.

4

I believe you already have the most common answer, youā€™ll need custom Comskip INI. You can check this page for come custom INIā€™s developed by the community or the Comskip forum for more community developed INIā€™s. Tuning Comskip and Custom Comskip INI's (Country / Channel specific)

Other options include:

  1. Develop you own custom INI using the Comskip INI GUI tool included with Comskip
  2. Use MCEBuddy Custom Cuts to manually mark the commercials to cut
  3. Use ShowAnalyzer included with MCEBuddy instead of Comskip to detect commercials. Some folks find better success with ShowAnalyzer compared to Comskip for some channels. It also has a built in GUI tool to adjust the commercial detection algorithm
5

Hi Goose,
Thanks for your reply. I apologize for the lengthy reply gap. Unfortunately by the time you responded, I had given up looking for a solution here and havenā€™t logged on until now. My email notification does not always work so I didnā€™t know you had responded.

Anyway, I do appreciate and did investigate all your suggestions. However, the custom INIā€™s I found were all quite old, and none of them seemed to deal with this issue either in general or specific terms.

This left me with the ShowAnalyzer option. I searched on that word and found some references to it in the FAQā€™s but nowhere does it tell me where I can download a relatively recent copy of it. I found a downloadable copy of v1.1 at https://showanalyzer.software.informer.com/ but it has a date on it of Sep 2011. Is that the most recent version? Also, it seems it is not free, which implies the need for a key or some form of activation. I found some discussion that the developer had at some point abandoned the development. Is this still true? Am I looking at out of date information? If true, how would I obtain a key or activation?

Can you provide any additional guidance, possibly more specific?

Thanks again - much appreciated.

6

ShowAnalyzer is included with MCEBuddy. If you didnā€™t select it while installing MCEBuddy you can install it manually from the installation folder within the MCEBuddy installed location.