[mythtv-users] Help with commercial flagging -- cutting out part of program

[John Biundo]

Hi all,

I've been searching for some documentation on commercial flagging and 
autoskip, but haven't been able to figure out how to best tune things to 
solve my problem.

I've noticed that I get what I'll call both "false positives" for 
commercial detection.  Meaning, sometimes the return from a commercial 
break isn't flagged, but rather the cut point is placed in the program 
content itself (i.e., part of the program is cut out along with the 
commercials).

This problem has occurred a few times in the last week.  For example, 
the entire end scene of a Seinfeld episode was cut out (they typically 
go to commercial, then come back and show a final short scene with 
credits rolling, and then end the show).  Also, the movie "What Lies 
Beneath" had several segments where the end-of-commercial marker was 
placed several seconds (maybe as many as 8 seconds) into the scene, 
cutting out that portion of the scene during playback.

Until recently, I was running only "Blank Frame Detection", but recently 
(and I'm pretty sure in both of the cases I described), it was run with 
"all".  I'm also running "strict commercial detection".

Any recommendations on what changes to make to help eliminate the false 
positives (i.e., not properly detecting the end of a commercial break) 
would be greatly appreciated.

Also, can anyone tell me how to determine which settings were used for a 
particular recording?  I'd like to conduct some experiments, and it 
would help greatly to be able to document with certainty which 
commercial skip method was used on a particular recording.  Poking 
around the database didn't turn up anything obvious.

Thanks in advance.

john