[mythtv-users] Disabling commercial auto-skip doesn't work: SOLVED

[Tom Lichti]

Well, this goes back awhile, for a long time I've had a strange issue 
with commercial skip that I only just figured out a few weeks ago, and I 
thought I would share for posterity what the problem was. In general, 
commercial detection works great for me, probably about 95% accurate (I 
am on standard cable in Ontario, Canada, for reference) with most 
problems occurring at the very end of recordings, sometimes the final 
scene got cut and the recording would end. I usually just went back into 
the recording, skipped to the end and watched what I missed. I would 
turn commercial-skip off at this time (I normally have it set to auto) 
and sometimes I just could NOT get it to skip into the break that I 
missed. I also noticed that the OSD sometimes would display the skip, 
and sometimes not. It never really bothered me, but I finally got 
motivated to investigate. What I found out was that a long time ago 
(probably close to 2 years) I had setup a user job that generated the 
cutlist from the commflag, and it was running on most of my recording 
schedules. My idea was to the use the lossless transcoding to cut out 
commercials completely, all automated. I never did get around to doing 
that as I didn't completely trust the comm flagger, and since it skips 
by itself, I didn't see the need. However, the gen cutlist stuff was 
still working away. What I finally realized was that if you are viewing 
a recording, the cut list takes precedence over the commercial list, and 
you cannot view anything that is in the cutlist, period. If you skip 
into that section, it will skip you out, regardless of what your 
commercial-skip setting is. I don't believe this is mentioned anywhere 
in the Myth documentation (I looked in the Wiki, on the mythtv website, 
and in the source docs), so I thought I'd bring it up, in case anyone 
else runs into this problem. The solution of course was to stop running 
the gen cutlist job.

Tom