How to Undo Commercial Cuts

[pjneary]

So I have had Comskip+DVRMSToolbox+WMC on Win7 running happily for several years. I recently noticed a problem on some recordings of the last season of "Homeland" on Showtime. Until then, I've recorded & viewed with no problems, and there have been no commercial cuts because Homeland has no commercials.

After the first few episodes of last season I started seeing commercial skips in the files--small at first, but now I'm losing major chunks of the show. I'm a S/W guy by trade and know this must be a very tricky business, so I would be perfectly happy if I could just remove the commercial skips from my Homeland's entirely.

I've banged around the forums and Googled a bit, and any kind of editing on com skips seems to require the use of a .TXT file. But my setup only produces a .WTV and a .LOG file in the recorded TV directory. I changed Comskip.txt to set "output_plist_cutlist=1" but new recordings don't seem to be generating that file--still only the LOG file is left.

So my question is: is there any way to undo the com skips in an existing recording? I've tried to backup over the skip and press PLAY, but that does not seem to work, it just skips over after a few seconds. I could live with having to re-scan my Homeland files, but then do I load the TXT file (that seems to remain when I scan manually) and remove the skips? The UX is a little clunky there, and I'm not sure what I'm seeing/doing.

I'm looking for any pointers that might get me back to full Homeland enjoyment. Secondly, I'd like to remove com skips at will from any file, as occasionally, the cuts are a little aggressive. (I've not altered comskip.ini from the delivered file from 2-3 years ago, version 0.81.045.)

Thx,
Paul
P.S. FWIW I'm on Cablevision in the NYC metro area

[erik]

You also can edit the .wtv file with notepad.exe and delete the information on the commercials to create an empty .wtv file
This will prevent reprocessing.

[pjneary]

Yea, no, the WTV file is a large binary file that I believe is the WMC wrapper for the MPEG file.

[erik]

What Comskip output file type have you selected?

[pjneary]

Well, based on trolling aroung in Comskip.txt, I see I have output_default and output_plist_cutlist set to 1; everything else is set to 0. The only filetypes I see for each recording is the WTV file, and a LOG file, which is clearly the Comskip log file. I cannot seem to get a .TXT file generated.

[pjneary]

OK, I believe I have sussed this out. It's a little odd in the WMC+DTB+Comskip environment because the meat of the commercial skip info is placed in another directory. While the WTV and Comskip LOG files wind up in whatever folder you told WMC was where Recorded TV goes, the key commercial skip files wind up in C:\Users\Public\Dvmrmstoobox\CommercialsXml. For each show recorded there are files with extensions of .TXT, .XML, .EDL, and .VIH, and named the same as the WTV file (thankfully). I'm not sure what they all do, but the key file is .XML. This to remove all com skips from my Homeland files, I edit the XML file in Notepad:
---

Code: Select all

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<root>
  <commercial start="2338.402733" end="2417.782033" />
  <commercial start="2546.3438" end="2615.5129" />
  <commercial start="2970.233933" end="3137.801333" />
</root>

---
Taking out the commercial nodes and just leaving

Code: Select all

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?><root></root>

removes all com skips. Caution is advised if you're not familiar with XML. FWIW, this directory does not seem to get cleaned up when you remove a recording from WMC, but since they are small files, this only wastes a few MB.