<HTML><BODY style="word-wrap: break-word; -khtml-nbsp-mode: space; -khtml-line-break: after-white-space; "><DIV><DIV>On Jan 12, 2007, at 12:11 PM, steve wrote:</DIV><BR class="Apple-interchange-newline"><BLOCKQUOTE type="cite"> <DIV class="Section1"><P class="MsoNormal"><FONT size="2" face="Arial"><SPAN style="font-size:10.0pt; font-family:Arial"><SPAN style="">So if I set MythTV to mark commercials while it’s recording, then to automatically transcode after recording is complete, should it transcode and cut commercials (I can’t see any reason why not), or can this only happen with manual action as implied in the manual?</SPAN></SPAN></FONT></P></DIV></BLOCKQUOTE>Notice you used two separate terms. "mark commercials" and "cut commercials" which indeed are two very different things.</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>mythcommflag does not add cutlists by default. It adds commercial flags. The difference is that when transcoding, it ignores commercial flagging but removes video between points in the cutlist. commflags are detected by the player and handled when playing back according to the setting (do nothing, notify there is a commercial flag, auto skip to the end of the commflag). This is because commercial flagging is not 100% accurate and many people would be upset to lose parts of their recordings if they don't view the video and manually decide to actually cut video based on what mythcommflag thought were commercials.</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>You can over-ride the mythcommflag command to add --gencutlist which would then create a cutlist instead of commercial flags - but don't complain when you lose parts of your program or if it missed the first commercial break, cuts our your program and leaves all the commercials (I haven't seen this, but I suppose it's possible in theory despite safeguards that it will never make a commercial flag more than x minutes or whatever). :)</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>People who want to automatically cut commercials usually set up a separate user job for programs where they feel confident they can trust mythcommflag and remove the video automatically. They would set this particular program to not run commflag after recording, then execute a user job set up exactly like commflag except with --gencutlist in the command, then run transcode.<BR><BLOCKQUOTE type="cite"><DIV class="Section1"><P class="MsoNormal"><FONT size="2" face="Arial"><SPAN style="font-size:10.0pt; font-family:Arial"><O:P></O:P></SPAN></FONT></P><P class="MsoNormal"><FONT size="2" face="Arial"><SPAN style="font-size:10.0pt; font-family:Arial"><O:P> <SPAN style="">One other question is how I can tell whether a particular show has been transcoded already or not. There doesn’t seem to be an icon to indicate this on the screen that lists the recorded shows. So if a commercials aren’t gone on a given show I can’t tell if it’s because transcoding isn’t happening (or hasn’t happened yet) or because it transcoded but didn’t cut the commercials.</SPAN></O:P></SPAN></FONT></P></DIV></BLOCKQUOTE>There is an icon to tell if the program has been flagged for commercials which should help in your determination. I usually look at the file size to determine if it's been transcoded or not. Some of the newer themes coming out as displaying the filesize right in the Watch Recordings screen which is convenient for this.</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>-Brad</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV></BODY></HTML>