TV Networks Sue Dish Over Commercial Skip

Dish Network launched a very limited version of commercial skipping for their satellite TV customers and now most of the big TV networks have sued Dish over it.

In the meantime, I continue to enjoy REAL commercial skipping with my aging SageTV setup.  I enjoy living in that no commercials world as long as I can.  I’m not surprised at all by the TV Networks lawsuit against Dish.  My bet is that Dish expects to quickly pull the feature after agreement from the networks that they will withdraw the lawsuit and in the end come out the tragic do-gooder brought down by the “big guys.”  All along Dish is getting valuable PR.

via ZatzNotFunny

Commercial Skipping The Easy Way – SageTV Commercial Detector

One of the big advantages of using Home theater PC’s (HTPC’s) as a DVR over your cable box DVR or even TiVo is commercial skipping.  Matter of fact, the first HTPC feature I shows guests is commercial skipping.  As a commercial begins on any TV show we’re watching time-delayed, we can simply hit the right-arrow button to skip to the end of that commercial.  It makes TV viewing so much better.

The problem is with most HTPC programs installing and setting up commercial skipping is less than easy and often requires multiple programs, time, and some techy know-how.  I’ve just experienced the 2nd easiest commercial skipping installation ever!  (BeyondTV is the easiest by far since commercial skipping is built in – unfortunately BeyondTV is a dead software PVR product.)

Let me introduce you to a dead-simple SageTV 7 plugin that allows you to install all commercial skipping and detecting software and set up that software in a few simple steps – all from the user interface.  CommercialDetector is the plugin that makes all of this possible.

About CommercialDetector

CommercialDetector is a SageTV7 plugin that automatically launches Comskip or ShowAnalyzer after a show has recorded or optionally while the show is recording. CommercialDetector produces the “.edl” files that can be read by the Comskip Playback plugin (also available in the UI Mod section of the plugin manager.)

The CommercialDetector plugin automatically installs Comskip (free version) for you when you install it through the SageTV Plugin Manager.  It replaces the more complex (and more sophisticated) programs such as SageJobQueue, DirMon2 and DVRMSToolbox for commercial detection.  The goal for CommercialDetector was to integrate tightly with SageTV, focus on commercial detection, configure & maintain easily within the SageTV UI.

Installation for Windows on the SageTV Server is very simple

1. Go to Plugin Manager and install the CommercialDetector (Setup>SageTV Plugins>All Available Plugins>General>”Commercial Detector”
2. In the Plugin Manager, Select and Install the “CommercialDetector UI” [Setup>SageTV Plugins>All Available Plugins>UI Mod>”Commercial Detector UI”]

That’s it for the installation – two steps all from the SageTV User Interface!

Tweaking & Configuring the Commercial Detector Settings

To Configure how CommercialDetector works by adjusting the settings in Setup>SageTV Plugins>Installed Plugins>CommercialDetector

Here you will find the following configurable settings right in the SageTV UI:

• Set number of commercial detecting jobs to run at once (I set this to 3 since I have a quad-core.
• Location of comskip.exe & comskip.ini programs (this can be left alone unless you install comskip somewhere other than the default location
• Modify comskip speed (to free up your CPU & disk as needed)
• Other comskip parameters
• Cleanup – Comskip tends to leave a mess of text, log and other files behind so you can use this setting to tell it what to remove once the commercial detecting process takes place
• Configure which channels to comskip or not – You may not want to use up CPU to commercial detect HBO for instance.
• Begin commercial detection when recording begins (instead of default-after recording complete)  So you can get your commercial detection marked even on liveTV.

There are many, many additional settings available including debug settings, ShowAnalyzer settings etc.  But the bottom line is this – you don’t HAVE to set up anything if you don’t want to.  It just works!  Hats off to the developer of this great plugin – tmiranda.

For more information about setup and settings, head to the Commercial Detector Plugin Wiki

The SageTV Forum Thread is the place to go to discuss and keep updated on new versions of Commercial Detector

Related Articles:

Manage Commercial Skip & Transcoding with Sage Job Queue

Commercial Skipping With SageTV – Comskip and Dirmon2

SageTV with Comskip and Comskip Monitor

Windows 7 Commercial Skipping – with DVRMSToolbox & ShowAnalyzer

Guide to ShowAnalyzer Commercial Skipping Settings

Guide to ShowAnalyzer Commercial Skipping Settings

Ben Drawbaugh of Engadget HD fame has posted a how-to guide that Home Theater PC (HTPC) enthusiasts should put on their must-read list.  If you use a HTPC such as SageTV or Windows MediaCenter you’ve probably heard of Comskip and ShowAnalyzer – the two most popular (and best) commercial skipping applications on the market.  Well Ben has the ultimate guide to tweaking ShowAnalyzer so that it detects commercials as accurately as possible.

The latest ShowAnalyzer beta allows you to set rules to tweak the settings per channel or even per show.  Ben’s guide requires that you roll up your sleeves and delve into the inner workings of ShowAnalyzer, but it’s an endeavor that will be well worth your while.

Check out the complete guide to ShowAnalyzer Settings at EngadgetHD

Discovered via MissingRemote

 

Related Articles:

Commercial Skipping With SageTV – Comskip and Dirmon2

Windows 7 Commercial Skipping – with DVRMSToolbox & ShowAnalyzer

ShowAnalyzer 1.0 Released as Public Beta

Manage Commercial Skip & Transcoding with Sage Job Queue

Sage Job Queue  - Boy that sounds like an unexciting piece of software!  But don’t let that stop you from checking this excellent program out.  Sage Job Queue or SJQ for short is a very powerful program that can manage anything from the simplest to the most complicated set of processing tasks and provide to you all of the control you could ever want or need.

What does SJQ do?

Sage Job Queue (SJQ) is similar to Comskip Monitor, DVRMSToolbox and DirMon2, SJQ watches for new media files and based on the instructions you give it, it automatically processes those files to detect commercials as well as other processes such as transcoding to other media formats.  The impressive thing is how flexible and powerful SJQ is.  SJQ can handle just about any set of instructions you throw at it including:

• Process all commercial skipping (you pick the program whether it’s comskip, Show Analyzer, VideoReDo or something else) whenever a new recording shows up in one of your SageTV recording drives
• Select from only the media you want commercial skipping to be processed on.  For instance say you want it to always ignore premium channels like HBO or Showtime, or perhaps any PBS channels – SJQ can do that.  Want to only process commercial skipping on channels 1 – 102?  Yep, SJQ can do that also.  To be exact, SJQ can pick and choose to your hearts desire on which things get processed so you don’t waste valuable processing power on your HTPC server on shows or other media that don’t have commercials or that you just don’t want commercials detected on.
• Run multiple instances of your commercial skip program at once.  Have a quad-core processor? You can run four instances.  Have two computers in the home – one as your HTPC server and another is your HTPC “extender” PC (sorry MediaCenter guys)?  Yep you can use SJQ to use the CPU cores from BOTH computers to run commercial detection.  Imagine a quad-core server PC and a dual-core extender PC on the same network all running comskip at the same time to speed up that processing and you get the idea.
• Run transcode, commercial detect & other processes from SJQ.
• Want to monitor or manage your commercial detection or transcoding remotely?  Well SJQ lets you do that.  There’s a web-based UI for configuring and managing & reviewing the files in the queue to be processed.
• Use SJQ to move recordings to a NAS after they're done recording. I thought that was pretty cool as you could let your NAS do what it's good at and not try to stick SageTV + supporting pieces on it.
• Find older recordings (for example recordings over 30 days old) and transcode those files to save disk space.
• Transcode certain media files into a different format such as iPod-friendly files & move them into your iPod media folder all automatically

So what’s the downside to SJQ?

There ARE one or two negatives to SJQ.  The first one is that it only works with SageTV – sorry MediaCenter, XBMC and other HTPC users.

The second downside is the one that has kept me from using SJQ until now - this program isn’t the easiest thing to configure and set up.  It’s not impossible by any means, but it takes some real work and reading to learn it.  Lots of steps are to be taken to get this program to do what you want it to.  But don’t let that stop you.  Once I took the time to delve into SJQ and learn how to make it do what I wanted it to it’s something even I could figure out. 

How Do I Get Started?

I highly recommend you take a few hours to learn it and set it up to use with your SageTV setup.  I’ll provide a basics guide to getting started with SJQ next, but I’ll warn you now – you really should read the documentation all the way through.  In the meantime here’s a screen-shot from the web interface showing SJQ working through my long list of recorded TV shows

Read more about SageJobQueue at the SageTV Forums.  And stay tuned to GeekTonic for a how-to on SJQ

Commercial Skipping With SageTV – Comskip and Dirmon2

When I answer the question, “why use a Home Theater PC (HTPC)?”  I usually start by showing off the commercial skipping feature – one of the favorite features at my home.  As a commercial begins on any TV show we’re watching time-delayed, we can simply hit the right-arrow button to skip to the end of that commercial.  It makes TV viewing so much better.  This article is a how-to on using one of the better methods of commercial detection for SageTV – Comskip and Dirmon2.  Read on for a simple how-to on setting it up.

OVERVIEW OF COMMERCIAL SKIPPING WITH SAGETV

SageTV is an excellent HTPC software program that transforms your home computer into a powerful, supercharged DVR with many additional features than you would find with your cable or satellite box DVR or even your TIVO.  Commercial detection and skipping isn't built-in to SageTV, but is free and easy to set up.  NOTE:  skipping based on a set time (default skip is 3030 seconds, but is configurable to other time lengths) is built in to SageTV.  SageTV's Website

At the GeekTonic home we rarely watch commercials any more except for the occasional sports program.  This is because it is so easy to install an add-on into SageTV that analyzes your recorded shows and marks the start and end point of most commercials so you can quickly skip over the commercials and go straight to the content. 

Here's how it works once installed.  When you hit the play button on your remote control a status bar appears at the bottom of the television screen like this one:

You'll note the dark green portions of the status bar, these are the commercials that were detected.  When you hit the skip button on your remote control (my skip button is mapped to the "right" button on my remote control) it will skip to the next start or end point of the next commercial.  You can skip back the same way with the back button as well.  It works much like the chapters in DVD's with the start and end points of each commercial acting as the chapter marks.

To give you an idea of how commercial skipping works, check out this very-short screen-cast I made while viewing a SageTV-recorded television show:

In the video I press the play button on my remote to show you the status bar during playback of a show.  Then the show gets to a commercial - at this point I hit the skip commercial button and it goes to the end point of that commercial.  If for some reason the commercial detection was off a little, I can do a rewind or fast forward a few seconds to get to the correct spot.

Read on for a very detailed how-to on setting it all up.  I’ve leaned toward giving more detail than needed just in case but it should be a very easy and quick install.