I purchased the full version a few months ago. I’m finding that it is only removing commercials on approximately 50% of the time. I’ve tried tweaking the profile and no such luck. I’ve even tried trying the other commercial detector and nothing. What a waste of a program! This is extremely frustrating as I paid money for this program to find that it really doesn’t work! I thought I could save money by recording the episodes and remove the commercials and move it to my plex server. Looks like I’m back to purchasing seasons on blu-ray and ripping to my plex server.
You could help us understand what might be the problem with what you are recording so that we can offer more specific suggestions to help comskip (what MCE Buddy uses to mark and remove commercials) do a better job for you.
It does a great job for me, but there are times when the stations broadcast shows in a way that interferes with identifying the ads. Notably, when the station runs a “crawl” continuously, ads aren’t recognized. e.g. weather alerts, election results, school closings, “breaking news”, etc.
So what stations and/or shows are you recording that MCE Buddy is having problems with?
All my recordings are from OTA broadcasts using an HDHomeRun. MCEBuddy removes some of the commercials but most of them it misses. I understand the weather alert crawls, school closings during the winter messes everyone up and nothing can be done to rectify that. However it is all my other recordings that it just doesn’t want to remove the commercials. I’ve seen on posts elsewhere that some people use VideoReDo to manually remove commercials, but that is a painstaking manual process.
What shows/networks are you recording? I have some HDHR tuners and MCE Buddy. I could record them and see if my setup does the same and share my profiles.
I predominantly just record CW shows…Arrow, Flash, Supergirl, Legends. Thanks in advance for your help.
While I have found that MCEBuddy isn’t a perfect program, I would say it removes about 90%-95% of commercials accurately for me. I live in the US and record a lot of OTA content. I do have HDHomeRun as well, but use a different recording program. I record “Craxy Ex-Girlfiend” from the CW and it cuts commercials accurately for me. In the past, I have tried messing around with the Comskip ini for a couple of trouble shows like NBC Nightly News, where they do have a news ticker at the bottom, but honestly, it IS VERY time consuming, and in the end, for me, the default one works best overall.
I am not sure of how fast your internet speed is, or if there are size limitations on an upload to the MCEBuddy FTP site, but if you want to upload a sample file where you got bad results (50% commercial removal), I would be glad to run a sample of one of your shows through my MCEBuddy setup and see if the results are different. Just follow the FTP upload instructions in the support forums.
I would recommend that you check your comskip.ini (are you using comskip for removal? It works best for me) to be sure you are using the default one, and haven’t made some changes that are negatively impacting your commercial removal success rate. If you go to C:\Program Files\MCEBuddy2x\comskip, you will find your comskip.ini as well as the comskipINIEditor.exe program. If you open the editor program, it will show defaults, so you can change things back if needed.
Based on the info you have provided, it sounds like it’s likely a setup issue, as a 50% success rate would not be enjoyable at all.
Welcome to the MCE Buddy user community.
Just so you know, I have been using MCE Buddy for about 3 years and have recorded about 24,000 videos (TV shows and movies) with 8 HD Homerun tuners. I have also ripped about 4,000 DVDs. My NAS is 96 terrabyes, of which I am using about 30 tb. My plex server has a 16 core AMD threadeipper and a high end graphics card for it’s math processing ability. When I started out with a dual core machine, Plex would crash somewhat frequently, and it took 1-3 hours to process a video. It now takes 5-15 minutes, and I run up to 8 concurrent MCE Buddy jobs to strip out ads and cut the video format to 720p. I am saying this to let you know there are folks out there that are running some fairly large servers and have processed a lot of files, and it does work.
With that said, it takes a fairly high end CPU and NVidia video card to run several concurrent Plex sessions (transcoding on the fly) and even any MCE Buddy jobs. Also to do the commercial identification and removal, MCE Buddy uses Comskip by default, which my experience is that it is the best one out there.
What you will run into with OTA recorded shows is that the recording is going to Cary in quality and the ad markers that are on the video may or may not be there. If you see the raw video, are there any spots with pixelation? Drop outs will cause problems with audio and video sync and ad detection.
There are instructions on how to upload a problem video and hopefully it can be looked at and the issue identified. The solution may be to re-record to get a better recording.
Also, I have found that Comskip tuning has not helped me, so I would run the default Comskip settings at least until you get comfortable with it. MCEBuddy is an orchestrator, it uses the best of breed programs to scale/transcode video and strip commercials, while managing the jobs.
Good luck!
I have been using MCEBuddy/Comskip for several years to remove commercials from my OTA recordings. It seems to do a good job of removing most commercials. The commercials that do not get removed seem to be the ones that are advertisements for that networks shows.
I appreciate everyone chiming in, but I am beyond frustrated with this program. I’ve edited the comskip ini file based on an a post for OTA on the comskip forums and it really didn’t work. It still leaves commercials in the file. It looks like the only option I have to do is manually edit my files with a video editor.or just buy the season sets when the are released.
Manual commercial removal is EXTREMELY time consuming, and if that’s the route you choose, then that is what works best for you then. Since you messed around with the comskip settings, and possibly other settings with MCEBuddy, I would recommend that you do a complete uninstall of MCEBuddy altogether. Download that latest version, then reinstall and try using default settings again.
What program do you use to actually record your shows? Your recordings are OTA using an HDHomeRun Tuner, but curious what program actually records the shows for you? It can have a drastic impact on how MCEBuddy works I have found.
I thought I’d uninstall and reinstall the new version. Guess what. It still doesn’t work. This is beyond frustrating! It doesn’t remove all commercials and clips part of the show. How can you sell a product that doesn’t even work? You really need to go back to the drawing board.
Commercial detection is done via your Comskip.ini file. Looks like you created a custom comskip INI file. I’m guessing you edited the stock INI in the Comskip folder instead of creating a new one. Well, after you update, it will replace the stock INI with the new stock one.
The right way to do it is to create a copy of the INI, place in a different folder and point MCEBuddy to use that custom INI in your Conversion task -> Expert settings page. That way, when you upgrade, MCEBuddy will carry over your settings.
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