EyeTV Comskip and PID

Here you can ask your questions on how to use Comskip for the detection of commercials. Also questions on how to remove commercials are welcome
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Phillie14586
Posts: 16
Joined: Wed Aug 21, 2013 10:42 pm

EyeTV Comskip and PID

Post by Phillie14586 »

I am trying to find out why Comskip sometimes will not run with certain recordings.

Here is the last few lines of the EyeTV log:


Tue Jan 14 16:31:56 2014 - Found recording 411274680
Tue Jan 14 16:31:56 2014 - Marker count: 0
Tue Jan 14 16:31:56 2014 - 1. Processing "Betrayal" on [WHAM HDTV] channel [1013]...
Tue Jan 14 16:31:56 2014 - Path to recording is /Volumes/Martha/EyeTV Archive/Betrayal - "Sharper than a serpent's tooth...".eyetv/0000000018838db8.eyetvr
Tue Jan 14 16:31:56 2014 - Changing directory to /Volumes/Martha/EyeTV Archive/Betrayal - "Sharper than a serpent's tooth...".eyetv
Tue Jan 14 16:31:56 2014 - Running: "/Library/Application Support/ETVComskip/Wine.app/Contents/Resources/bin/wine" "/Library/Application Support/ETVComskip/comskip/comskip.exe" --ini="/Library/Application Support/ETVComskip/comskip/comskip.ini" "0000000018838db8.mpg" > /Users/ericphil2/Library/Logs/ETVComskip/411274680_comskip.log 2>&1
Tue Jan 14 16:31:56 2014 - Return code is: 768, 0x300
Tue Jan 14 16:31:56 2014 - Error code is: 3, 0x3
Tue Jan 14 16:31:56 2014 - No video pid found return from "comskip": 3
Tue Jan 14 16:31:56 2014 - Exiting


Here is the comskip.log:

Warning: could not find DOS drive for current working directory '/Volumes/Martha/EyeTV Archive/Betrayal - "Sharper than a serpent's tooth...".eyetv', starting in the Windows directory.
Wine cannot find the FreeType font library. To enable Wine to
use TrueType fonts please install a version of FreeType greater than
or equal to 2.0.5.
http://www.freetype.org
Wine cannot find the FreeType font library. To enable Wine to
use TrueType fonts please install a version of FreeType greater than
or equal to 2.0.5.
http://www.freetype.org
Wine cannot find the FreeType font library. To enable Wine to
use TrueType fonts please install a version of FreeType greater than
or equal to 2.0.5.
http://www.freetype.org
Comskip 0.81.056, made using avcodec
The commandline used was:
"Z:\Library\Application Support\ETVComskip\comskip\comskip.exe" "--ini=/Library/Application Support/ETVComskip/comskip/comskip.ini" 0000000018838db8.mpg

No such file or directory - could not open file 0000000018838db8.mpg


The .mpg file does sexist in the path with the correct name. I am not sure why the first log says "No video PID found" and the second log says "No such file or directory" Is this an EyeTV problem or a comskip problem or some communication between the two?
chico
Posts: 32
Joined: Sat Nov 26, 2011 2:48 am

Re: EyeTV Comskip and PID

Post by chico »

Phillie14586 wrote:I am trying to find out why Comskip sometimes will not run with certain recordings.
I've had this happen before, but I have to admit I don't remember exactly how I fixed it. Sorry for that.

Two things that come to mind are:

1) Sometimes permissions issues in the EyeTV Archive folder path and the ETVComskip and comskip folder paths have caused Comskip problems for me. Cleaned up permissions and all worked well again.

2) I've had certain issues with newer builds of comskip & EyeTV output files. You might try going back to _052 and see if you still have the problem. However, as I recall, those issues might not have been related to "file not found" errors.

The EyeTV log output you posted comes from the Python script inside the "Mark Commercials" package in the ETVcomskip folder inside the Application Support folder. I had some issues with that once and found a free OSX Python debugger online that let me single step through the Python script. That might be a good way to get a closer look at what's going wrong.

Hmmm...having said that, you might try running the Python script command line ["/Library/Application Support/ETVComskip/Wine.app/Contents/Resources/bin/wine" "/Library/Application Support/ETVComskip/comskip/comskip.exe" --ini="/Library/Application Support/ETVComskip/comskip/comskip.ini" "0000000018838db8.mpg"] directly from the OSX command line to see if you can get any better diagnostic info...?
Phillie14586
Posts: 16
Joined: Wed Aug 21, 2013 10:42 pm

Re: EyeTV Comskip and PID

Post by Phillie14586 »

I tried _052 and that did not help. I tried running the command line in the terminal and that gave me the identical errors. I also tried the command line with a file I knew worked and got the same error so I think that might be a problem of running the command out of context.

What is this PID? What does "Mark Commercials" do?
chico
Posts: 32
Joined: Sat Nov 26, 2011 2:48 am

Re: EyeTV Comskip and PID

Post by chico »

Phillie14586 wrote:I tried _052 and that did not help. I tried running the command line in the terminal and that gave me the identical errors. I also tried the command line with a file I knew worked and got the same error so I think that might be a problem of running the command out of context.

What is this PID? What does "Mark Commercials" do?
MarkCommercials is an OSX app that is called by the RecordingDone script. It's actually a compiled Python script (I'm not a Python guy so I may be saying some wrong things here). You can see the actual script by first locating MarkCommericals (/Lib/Application Support/ETVComskip/MarkCommercials), then control-click on MarkCommercials to open the package. Then Contents/Resources/MarkCommercials.py is the script.

If you know Python you can follow the script to see what it does. This is from the initial comments:

Code: Select all

# MarkCommercials.py, EyeTV3 version
#
# Copyright (c) 2008, Jon A. Christopher
# Copyright (c) 2008, TeamSTARS Dick Gordon and Rick Kier
# Licensed under the GNU General Public License, version 2
#
#
# Run comskip on the specified file and replace the markers in the .eyetvr
# file with the new markers.
#
# if no arguments show id, recording name...
#
# If argument is 'all', process all recordings which don't
# have markers and do not match any exclude information from the cfg file.  
#
# If argument is'forceall', process all recordings except those that match
# any exclude information in the cfg file.
#
# Otherwise, argument is treated as an EyeTV recording id, and that
# recording is processed if it is not excluded and it does NOT have any markers.
So basically what it does is runs Comskip under Wine (an OSX Windows emulator, since Comskip runs under Windows), then takes the markers generated by Comskip, translates them to the marker format used by EyeTV, and marks them in the EyeTV recording. It also writes its progress to a log file (which you've seen).

If you have Parallels or VMWare, you can run Comskip under Windows to see if your problem is Comskip or not. To do that, read the instructions on this site, "Tuning Comskip". For the input video file, go to your EyeTV recording ("recordingName.eyetv"), control-click it to show package contents and reveal the .mpg file, and move that to your Windows environment to use it with Comskip. That eliminates any of the ETVcomskip/OSX stuff from the debugging process. If it runs ok under Windows but not the Mac, then there's something in the ETVcomskip setup that's funky. If it doesn't run properly under Windows, this site should be able to help you with the support you need. But most of the users on this forum (including Erik Kaashoek) aren't OSX or ETVcomskip users and won't give assistance for questions relating to other than Comskip itself.

By the way, I'm assuming you're using the donator's version of Comskip, yes?
Phillie14586
Posts: 16
Joined: Wed Aug 21, 2013 10:42 pm

Re: EyeTV Comskip and PID

Post by Phillie14586 »

Chico,
Thanks for showing me how to get to MarkCommercials. I have always been wanting to see under the hood of that program. I need to do a lot more learning if to make heads or tails of that program. In the mean time I got a response in the AVS forum and it turns out the problem is with the quotes in the file name. Those special characters will get you every time.
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