10.10.07 9:24am - Application Release Coming
I've been hard at work on this commercial-removing app. I'm currently testing it and throwing a website together to support it. Since I plan to have this up within a week or so, I won't be distributing the URL of the old app. Check back in a few days for a new post regarding this topic.
I'm not a fan of commercials. They make me set down my beer to pick up the remote and skip past them. So awhile ago I checked out a project called DVRMSToolbox and blogged about it here
DVRMSToolbox comes with a lot of small applications that allow you to sorta create your own flow. I'm a developer and I found this approach to be a tad bit overwhelming. While it gives you a great deal of flexibility, it also is a bit more complicated if you simply want to cut commercials out of the video file. I also had issues w/ the FileSystemWatcher and the MC add-in acting up. I just want something more straightforward and stable.
Over the holiday break, I decided to start up a new project to deal w/ commercials as well as a few other annoying issues that plague my Media Center library.
This app (which doesn't have a definite name yet) does 3 things:
1) Removes duplicate shows
2) Removes partial shows
3) Removes commercials from .dvr-ms files permanently
It's a windows forms app that runs in the background. It has a tray icon to let you know it's running and to let you 1) start/stop it's heartbeat and 2) manually perform scans.
Every X minutes, it scans your Media Center library for dupes, partials, and shows w/ commercials. If duplicate or partial shows are found, they are moved to the recycle bin. If shows with commercials are found, they are processed.
Why the need to remove dupes?
Media Center does a pretty good job about not recording the same show twice in a given time period. It knows what shows it's recorded because it stores this info in a recordings.xml file on the main OS partition. Unfortunately, I use True Image to backup/restore my C: drive and the recordings.xml file gets wiped out. Thus, Media Center will record shows that already exist in my library.
Why the need to remove partials?
Because every now and again, I have to shut my computer down while a show is 5 minutes into recording - and I'm left w/ a 5 minute show which is useless. Or I boot my machine back up just in time for Media Center to record the last 10 minutes. Whatever the reason, it's not hard to get partial shows in your library. The minimum minute threshold is configurable.
So what about that commercial removal?
Commercials are removed completely from the video. This means your video files will be smaller and shorter in duration. It also means you don't need any Media Center add-in to play these files. The only downside is that if the analyzer is wrong and removes non-commercial video, you don't have a backup outside your recycle bin.
On my AMD dual-core 3.0ghz machine, a half-hour show (best-quality) typically took less than 5 minutes to remove commercials. That includes analyzing the show, cutting out the commercial video, merging the metadata from the original file, and updating the Media Center library.
The current analyzer that I'm using is ComSkip (site). So far, it's performed exceptionally well. I've not yet run into a case where ComSkip mistakenly marked actual content as a commercial. It's also free and fast. Once a video file has had it's commercials removed, the original file is moved to the recycle bin.
I'm still chuggin' away on this project, but it's working pretty nicely. Need to add some UI for the options/features as they are currently only changeable via app.config. If anyone is interested in trying out this commercial-removal-sweetness on their machine, use the contact form above or leave a comment below.
Just want to say how frickin' awesome it is to watch 3 shows in an 60 minutes.