[mythtv-users] commercial skipping recorded shows

[William Preston]

> If no blank frame list or commercial skip list exists for a video,
> then the player has to manually scan frame-by-frame to find blank
frames.
> This is SLOWWWWWWWWWW and is the pause that is being seen.  I believe
> that I can eliminate this by adding code to allow the frontend to query
> the current blank frame list from the recorder the same way it queries
> the seektable.  This blank frame list could then be used to generate
> a quick commercial skip list to allow nearly instantaneous skipping.

It could easily be me, but I recently switched my box over to do
transcoding, and (to me) it seems like commercial skips are slow now.
This is hours later after the show has been transcoded--I just seem to
remember hitting skip and instantly being at the next breakpoint.  Now, it
seems like I'll hit it, it'll immediately (in the OSD) show 'Skipping xxx
seconds' (indicating to me that there is a blank frame list in the
database), but then it'll hang there for about 5-10 seconds before jumping
to the breakpoint.

I apoligize if it's completely my imagination, but I've taken to hitting
forward several times as the commercial skip takes way too long for me
anymore--I used to love it in the past, though, because it was an
instantaneous jump.

> It's on my TODO list which means it's running as a nice-ed background
> process in my brain right now. :)  This should be pretty easy to do, so
> it should be implemented in the near future.

The mythtranscode process fires off as a nice'd background process, so
borrowing that code should be easy enough to do :)  Perhaps even splitting
it out (like mythtranscode) so that it can be scheduled--meaning,
commercial-detect is fired off first, then transcode?  That could also
allow commercial-detect to restart on unfinished jobs if the backend goes
down in the middle of a detection, like transcode does.