skip commercials

Jeff Viola

Does this feature work? I have the box checked, but I still have commercials in my recordings? Is there more to the setup that I am missing?

Robert Cameron

It currently does nothing, as I understand from the docs. It is a placeholder for possible future functionality.

You can do it yourself, though, but running a post-record script. Comskip works for this purpose, but does require some tuning to get it to work a little better.

If using Comskip, after it is run you will get a .txt file in the recording directory with the same file name as the recording. The advantage to this is that if you use Kodi, it will use the comskip EDL automatically. (And if skips a commercial that was incorrectly marked, just press "Down", or whatever you have mapped to Big Step Back/-10 Mins, and it will go back to the commercial mark and play through.)

Stefan Pappalardo

Is +Skip commercials+ flag still a placeholder and comskip as +Post-processor command+ the way to go?

UPDATE #1

+Skip commercials+ dependents on a EITp/f (EPG running state) which seems not to be offered by the DVB-S muxes/servers in Germany.

I switched to comskip with +Post-processor command+.

/usr/bin/comskip "%f"

* comskip can easily be installed on Ubuntu 20.04.2:

sudo apt install comskip

* I was fiddling around with the comskip.ini for quite a long time, before I found the tuning guide on the comskip.org website.
* Testing with RTL Television channel brought good results, so I switched to the defaults by providing no comskip.ini at all.
* Next step will be to create a cleanup routine for the skip file recording.txt after removing the recording.ts stream file. I guess this would be a job for +Post-remove command+.

UPDATE #2

This was unexpected. But the cut-/skip-point file (i.e. recording.txt) will be deleted automatically by tvheadend.Great :-)