[mythtv-users] any way to load cutlist while still flagging?

[Chris Pinkham]

* On Thu Feb 21, 2008 at 10:12:16PM -0500, Ronald Frazier wrote:
> >  It does this now. If I start recording something and start watching it
> >  several minutes after it starts, it will skip commercials it has found
> >  so far.
> >  The commercial flag setting is off by default for LiveTV if that's
> >  what you're talking about. Feel free to turn it on.
> 
> I'm not talking about live TV, I'm talking about a recorded program
> that I'm watching "almost live". Ex: Program is scheduled to record at
> 8PM. I sit down to watch it at 8:20 and finish at 9PM after skipping
> commercials. Unless I did something wrong without realizing it, I
> didn't think this worked. I even tried loading a cutlist and it had
> nothing to load.

For this to work, several things have to occur:

- You have the "Start Auto-Commercial Flagging jobs when the recording starts"
  setting turned on in mythtv-setup.
- You have to have the JobQueue setup to allow commercial flagging jobs during
  the time period you are watching the recording.
- You have to have "Run Transcode Jobs before Auto-Commercial Flagging"
  turned Off in mythtv-setup.
- You have to have commercial flagging turned on for the recording's
  schedule.
- The JobQueue has to start the flagger for the recording you're watching.
  If there are other jobs ahead of this flagger job, then you won't get
  the realtime updates.  This is important because if you have recording
  capacity enough to record 3 programs at a time, but only enough JobQueue
  capacity to flag 2 at a time, then you wouldn't be able to get the
  realtime flagging info for that 3rd in-progress recording.

> Are you by any chance using automatic commercial skip? I've had that
> feature turned off and just had the cutlist loaded instead. Perhaps
> that behaves differently. Maybe I should re-look into that.

This feature has nothing to do with the cutlist or auto-skip.  When you start
playing back a recording, a COMMFLAG_REQUEST message is sent out.  If
commercial flagging is currently in progress for this recording, the flagger
will start sending out COMMFLAG_UPDATE events to let the player know about
any changes to the commercial skip list.  Whenever the flagger starts, it
send out a COMMFLAG_START event which lets any player know that flagging is
running for that recording.  The player then expects to get COMMFLAG_UPDATE
events to update the commercial skip list.  These events occur whether the
flagger is local on the same machine as the player or if they are on different
hosts.

--
Chris