[Pending] Live commercial skip detection (1 Viewer)

sccrgoalie1

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I've submitted a pull request with updated code to support live commercial skipping and toggling of automatic commercial skipping. This request consists of a couple areas of change.

1. Added two new actions ACTION_TOGGLE_AUTO_COMMERCIAL_SKIP and ACTION_STEP_BACK_PREVIOUS_JUMP that can be assigned buttons. The first allows you to toggle auto commercial skip while watching a program, and the second allows you to jump back to the previous jump point in the case of an erroneous jump.

2. Update g_player to support the new actions and support live reading of .edl files. These will be the new default commercial file for Media Portal as they don't rely on a Framerate to get the commercial position. In your comskip.ini you must set output_edl=1 to get that file.

3. Add in filewatcher to watch the commercial file and reload when there is a change. This allows for skipping while a file is currently being recorded. Say for example I start watching a show 15 minutes after the start, I now should get auto skipping throughout.

4. Update commercial skipping logic such that if you for some reason end up in a commercial segment with auto skipping enabled you will be skipped right to the end of the segment. Previously you had to be watching up to the skip point for the skip to work. Now if I skip into the commercial segment the algorithm will quickly skip me to the end.

5. Added an event for Skin dev's to subscribe to to be notified when there are changes to the chapter segments (I'm not sure this is necessary as they may load on demand (when the progress bar shows) anyway)

Here's my fork:
https://github.com/sccrgoalie1/MediaPortal-3
 
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elliottmc

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    Could you please explain from a user perspective what will happen when you try to skip commercials with this patch, and what currently happens, so that the difference is clear?
     

    sccrgoalie1

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    Sure, there are two main changes with the release of this patch.

    1. If you start watching a show that is currently recording, Media Portal now has the ability to keep reloading the commercial jump points while you are watching. This means, for example, you can start an hour show 15 minutes in and never see any commercials.

    2. Previously you had to be watching a show right to the jump point. If you accidentally skipped over a jumped point the commercial segment would not be skipped. Now Media Portal considers the entire commercial span (eg. from 1 min - 2 minute). If I end up at any point between 1 and 2 minutes the commercial skip will automatically happen (if enabled). Along with this comes two new actions that can be assigned to buttons. First is an action to toggle automatic commercial skip while watching a show. This allows you to turn off the auto commercial skip just for a single show if it's not working right. The second is an action to jump back to the previous skip point. This allows you to skip back to the point at which you were last skipped automatically (this is great if a commercial segment is slightly misidentified). These two actions should be used together because before you skip back to the previous jump point you need to turn off auto commercial skipping otherwise it will just do the skip again.

    Hopefully, that helps. If not, please let me know what's unclear.
     

    johanj

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    I thought that a the main problem of adding comskip to live tv was that comskip had problems with the live ts file. Has those problems been adressed or do I remember it wrong?
     

    sccrgoalie1

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    I've only been using Media Portal and thus .ts files for about a month, but comskip hasn't had a single issue with the live ts files.
     

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