BeyondTV 4.3 broke Comskip Live?

[kerryklarson]

Erik,

Do you have anything else in the works for this problem? Thanks.

Kerry

[erik]

I consider adding some special logging to the code so some of you can run some tests.
At the moment I am rather busy with other things (like earning money )
Keep reminding me from time to time, but not this week.

[erik]

I made a special debug version

Download
comskiptest.zip
and run the comskip that is in there with live_tv=1 and verbose=12 as normal during recording
You will get a HUGE log file.

Mail me the log file.

[leecole]

I will be happy to do so. Where is this zip located?
Lee Cole

[leecole]

OK, I have it.
Lee Cole

[erik]

Made a new test version.
download again.
New ini variable
set
live_tv_retries=8
verbose=12
live_tv=1
and try again, mail me the log file.

[leecole]

Eric,
PERFECT....
Thanks,
Lee Cole

[erik]

Glad to hear!
The buffering inside BTV sometimes does not write out the data to the disk for up to 4 seconds (may depend on the processor load)

[leecole]

Thanks, for all your work on this. I support a addon tool for BTV, AutoXvid, which is posted by BTV when it has completed recording a show. My tool then automaticlly cuts commercials, then encodes to Xvid. I now offer three methods of commercial cut that utilizes comskip.
comskip and mpgtx for SD
comskip and projectx for SD
comskip and VideoReDoPlus for both SD and HD.
Now if the user is watching a show, and decides to cut and encode, they can key a hotkey and the show is cut and encoded without them interrupting their viewing.
Thanks again for a GREAT tool.

[kerryklarson]

Erik,

At first I thought that everything was working well with the new version. Comskip wasn't stopping before the end. I was consistently seeing 4-6 retries and then it continued on. Then I realized that the accuracy seemed to be dismal.

So I recorded a show and ran Comskip with the live parameters. When it was done recording, I ran Comskip again with the non-live parameters on the same recording. The non-live session was much more accurate. The live session hardly detected anything. This was not true before the BTV update. With previous versions of BTV and Comskip, the live detection was quite accurate.

I've uploaded log files including *.csv to your FTP server in the "Live and Non-Live" folder. The *.ini parameters were identical other than the two live entries.

Thanks for continuing to improve such a great product.

Kerry

Addendum: I rolled back BTV to 4.2 on one of my PCs. b47 was accurate with 4.2. Unfortunately, it looks like there is more to the problem than just the premature EOF.

[kerryklarson]

Erik??? Is this something that you're looking into?

[erik]

Not today, but its good you keep remembering me

[kerryklarson]

I was hopeful that the new version 4.4 of BeyondTV would resolve this problem, but it has not. Whatever changed in 4.3 is still present (but not in 4.2).

Comskip is unable to correctly detect commercials in the "live" mode (live_tv=1) with BTV 4.3 and 4.4. This appears to be directly related to the end of file premature termination problem which was fixed with a previous Comskip version. If I start up Comskip right after a program starts recording, it doesn't accurately find any commercials. If I wait to start Comskip until after the program has been recording for awhile, it correctly finds commercials until it catches up to the end of the recording (Read only 0 bytes, retries = 6), then doesn't find them anymore. It's as though the earlier fix prevents Comskip from terminating prematurely, but it's still not reading the recording program data correctly.

[kerryklarson]

From Snapstream forums: http://forums.snapstream.com/vb/showpos ... stcount=17:

Kilrsat
Administrator

It shouldn't be reading in the last 4MB of a file until the recording finishes. This area will contain garbage information during the recording (starting with 4.3). It is most likely what makes any live scanning not work.

[erik]

That explains a lot.
Now we need to find out what the "last" 4 mbyte is during recording
I have posted the question in the snapstream forum