Smart chapter accuracy?

[pretzelb]

I was going to try one of the great tools created by users for cutting commercials (ex cutads, igcutter) so I setup my HTPC to start generating smart chapters. It took a while for my slow HTPC to catch up but this weekend I noticed a few shows with chapter info. I started watching these shows and noticed that the smart chapter marks weren't all that accurate. Some were too short and some were non-existant.

Is this normal or maybe is it more on a show-by-show basis? I only watched a few episodes of the SAME show so maybe this particular is a bad candidate for automatic commercial cutting (like what cutads can do).

[RobertH]

The smart chapter engine looks for fade-to-black and a drop in overall audio, then a sudden increase in audio (comercials are always louder) Some networks (UPN in particular) dont fade to black and will just cut/fade directly to commercial, and if your cable signal has too much noise on it the engine will basically be useless.

I used to use them but my primary recording networks (toon, upn, scifi) all use commercial methods that the engine doesnt pick up on so 9 out of 10 recordings would either have the wrong spots marked as commercials or none at all. It would however be dead on for anything I recorded on NBC, fox, history, or some of the other stations I occasionally record.

[pretzelb]

Perhaps it's a network issue. The show I was using as an example was off the Food Network so maybe their anti-commercial skip tactics are better than others.

It's too bad - setting up a batch job to automatically cut the commercials on your recordings would save me a ton of personal time.

[nanook105]

I find that the skip forward/backward functions work just as well. With skip forward, it is typically 4 clicks (30 second each). If it goes to far, it is just a couple of backward clicks (7 seconds each) to find the right spot.

[Eric3a]

In my experience it's a network by network thing. And within networks, different shows fare better too.
I have great success with "The Daily Show" for exemple where I would feel confortable having an automatic tool take the commercials out.
But BBC News just doesn't play.

In some Betas when unable to SmartChapter, I really miss the feature, even though a few 30 seconds jump are almost as good.
Eric

[pretzelb]

The only use I would really have for Smart Chapters is to feed into a program to automatically cut the commercials. If I'm watching a recording, I find my skip forward/backward controls good enough (at least for me).

Thanks for the info.