There are various reasons for comskip not to find commercials.
A first and main reason for failing is recording from an analog input in low quality. Comskip needs a good recording to succeed.
If you use S-VHS, CVBS or analoge tuner input do record at least in medium quality, that is at least 4mb/s on mpeg2. Digital sources like ATSC or any of the DVB variants used with a receiver card in the PC should nearly always give a clean signal.
Comskip also finds it difficult to work on noisy recordings. Try to get a nice clean signal.
On certain broadcasts the audio and video are not well aligned, try to increase the volume slip in steps of 20 to max 100 such as
volume_slip=40
A second problem is making a lot of changes to the default ini file.
If everything fails, restart from the default ini file and try to set
detect_method=111, or
detect_method=47
That should enable most detection methods. Once you see some results you can start to tune again.
If you still have problems and did read the tuning manual and tried the debug window and you understand what you are doing and still can't get good results you may have a very interesting recording.
Follow these instructions and I will be glad to help you
Set
output_framearray=1
and
verbose=10
in your comskip.ini
Run Comskip on the recording.
copy the generated .txt file to a file with the same name but with .ref as an extension.
Edit the .ref file such that it contains the start and stop frame numbers of the commercials as you would like them to be found.
Zip the comskip.ini, the .csv, .log and .ref files together and mail me the zip file so I can have a look.
Have fun!