Remove interstitials?

General Support / Questions Commercial Removal
2

Welcome to the community! You’ve laid out a very clear and interesting use case.

The short answer is yes, MCEBuddy (via Comskip) can identify and remove these transition bumpers/interstitials, but you are barking up a slightly tricky tree. Because your source file already has the main commercial blocks removed, the remaining interstitials are isolated, extremely short (usually 2 to 10 seconds), and sit directly between two massive blocks of the show.

By default, Comskip is tuned to ignore very short non-show segments because it assumes a “commercial break” must be at least 30 to 60 seconds long.

To make this work automatically, you will need to trick Comskip into recognizing these short transitions as commercial breaks. Here is how you can do it, along with a couple of alternative methods that might actually save you a lot of time.

Method 1: The Automated Path (Tuning Comskip)

You can create a custom comskip.ini file specifically for this show.

  1. Open your MCEBuddy installation directory and look for the Comskip INI Editor (MCEBuddy\Comskip\ComskipINIEditor.exe) or simply copy the default comskip.ini to a safe folder to edit it manually.

  2. In your custom comskip.ini, modify or add the following parameters:

    • detect_bumper=1: Tells Comskip to actively look for bumpers and transition screens.
    • min_commercial_size=2: Lowers the minimum duration of an individual commercial cut (in seconds) so Comskip can flag a 3-second transition.
    • min_commercialbreak_length=2: Lowers the minimum duration of a “commercial break” so an isolated 3-second transition isn’t ignored for being too short.
    • min_show_segment_length=120: (This is the magic trick!) By default, Comskip thinks: “Hey, I see black frames, but this 5-second segment in between them is too short to be a commercial break, so it must be a tiny segment of the show.” By setting this to 120 seconds, you tell Comskip that no show segment can be shorter than 2 minutes. Any isolated segment shorter than 2 minutes (like your interstitials) will automatically be classified as a commercial/bumper and cut.
    • detect_method=255: Enables all detection methods (black frames, logo changes, scene transitions) to give Comskip the best chance of finding the transition card boundaries.

  3. In MCEBuddy, go to your Conversion Task → click Expert Settings → and under Comskip INI, point it to your newly modified comskip.ini file. (For more details on this, check out our guide on Tuning Comskip and Custom Comskip INI’s).

Method 2: The Semi-Manual Path (MCEBuddy Custom Cuts)

If Comskip’s automated detection isn’t frame-accurate enough (which can happen with tricky transitions), you can use MCEBuddy’s built-in Custom Cuts tool.

  1. Open the video in the Custom Cuts application (included in your MCEBuddy folder).
  2. Play through the file and manually mark the start and end of each transition interstitial.
  3. Save your cuts. This will generate an .edl (Edit Decision List) file in the same folder.
  4. When MCEBuddy processes the video, it will read this EDL file and cut out those exact frames with 100% precision. (You can read more about how these files work in this EDL/XML Files discussion).

Method 3: The “Easiest” Path (Adjusting the Subtitles Directly)

Since your ultimate goal is to make the subtitles line up, it might actually be significantly faster and less destructive to adjust the subtitle files directly rather than trying to cut the video.

Because video cuts are often bound to keyframes (I-frames), cutting the video can sometimes introduce a tiny fraction-of-a-second audio sync blip or visual stutter at the cut point. Shifting subtitles, however, is completely non-destructive and frame-accurate.

You can do this easily in about 2 minutes per episode using a free, open-source tool like Subtitle Edit:

  1. Open your video file and the English subtitle file in Subtitle Edit.
  2. Find the first commercial break in the video. Identify the exact duration of the transition interstitial (e.g., 5.4 seconds).
  3. Select the first subtitle line after that transition, right-click, and choose Select from here to end (or press Ctrl+Shift+Down).
  4. Go to Synchronization → Adjust all times (or use the shortcut Ctrl+Shift+Y) and add a delay of +00:00:05.400 (or whatever the exact duration was) to the selected lines.
  5. Repeat this simple process for the remaining 3 or 4 commercial breaks in the episode.

By the end of the file, your subtitles will be perfectly synced to the frame, and you won’t have had to re-encode or risk any visual glitches in your archived video!

If you want to stick to the video-editing route, try the Comskip INI tuning tips in Method 1 first, as they are your best bet for automating the process across multiple episodes. Let us know how it goes!