[mythtv-users] Last commercial break during recording

[Rod Smith]

On Friday 15 January 2010 11:34:01 am Aaron wrote:
> I'm not sure if this is a bug or "as designed"; but when recording a
> show and having it skip commercials, MythTV always misses the very
> last commercial break. Is this so you don't miss the preview for next
> week's show?

AFAIK, it's not a design feature. Two possible causes spring to mind:

1) The commflagging could simply be missing the last commercial break
   because it's atypical in one way or another (length, nature of
   gaps between it and the real program, etc.). In my experience,
   commflagging quality varies greatly from one network to another
   and between one break and another, so a systematic missing of
   certain breaks is plausible. I find exactly the opposite with
   The Daily Show on Comedy Central -- it interprets the short tag
   at the end of the show as part of the commercial break, so
   skipping that break skips up to the start of the next show. This
   problem doesn't exist with most other shows. It's entirely
   plausible that you might have the other problem.

2) Sometimes, when commflagging while recording, the commflagging
   process terminates before the recording has finished. This seems
   most common for me when it's a remote backend doing the commflagging.
   The result is that the last commercial break (or two or three or
   more) will be unflagged. The solution is to run commflagging after
   the show has completely recorded. Since I often want to start
   watching while the show is still recording, I've left my system
   configured to start commflagging when the recording starts, but I
   also check the status page and if I notice anything with suspiciously
   few commercial breaks found, I go in and tell Myth to re-flag that
   recording. There may be a relatively simple solution to this problem
   (adjusting NFS mount options, for instance), but if so I don't know
   what it is.

-- 
Rod Smith