Smartskip

[paulgates]

Why doesn't smartskip seem to work in 3.5 (latest final version) ? It used to work with the beta version....

It doesn't bother me that much as i bought VideoReDo ($49 / £26) to CUT the commercials out completly, saving HD space!

Any ideas would be appriciated....

[nanook105]

I have at least 3-4 jobs per night that work just fine. What doesn't work ? Do your jobs fail, or are the markings inaccurate ?

[paulgates]

There are no markings at all, and i use BTV all the time. Often movies/progs are on late so i record them to view them later!

If anyone has any ideas, that would be great. Got BTV set up great now, just ironing out niggles!

[nanook105]

I won't pretend to know what a niggle is

When you go to Web Admin/Showsqueeze, are your smartchapter jobs listed and do the have a status of Successful ?

[Sandbag]

I have found that in the UK showsqueeze often gets it wrong or fails to mark anything at all. I don't know how showsqueeze actually works, but I guess it looks for some 'signal' (either an actual signal that the channel has sent over RF, or otherwise just a black screen). It could be that UK channels don't do this, but US ones do.

[paulgates]

Thanks Sandbag, i'd already thought that may be the case. It did work about 80% of the time before though. Just updated to 3.5.1 which fixes bugs, so i'll have to see if that helps at all.

Nanook - SkullsIII which i recorded overnight says Successful in webAdmin/showsqueze! (took 1 hour) My beyond TV won't show any recordings now untill i reboot. Not sure why it does that, although i do have ZoneAlarm running as i left my broadband connection on.

.... mmm

[ScAtMaN]

Im in the UK as well and im lucky if i get any chapters marked in a program.
Jobs run ok but I only ever get a few odd blocks marked, it all seems a bit hit and miss!
It does seem to be worse since the introduction of 3.5

Still its nothing to hit the skip button a couple of times but its a shame it cant be tweaked to better suit us UK users.

P.S. Im on Sky Digital, is that what your using paul??

[Sandbag]

For what it's worth, I use Sky Digital.

[nparker13]

Im in the US, and Show skip hasnt worked in about a year! I just gave up on it.

[paulgates]

Skatman, I'm using SKY digital too. Looking into it a bit more i found that if i record something that has a black/blank screen every now and then, BTV sees this as an ad-break! It's a good idea which doesn't work well and even when it did it wasn't accurate enough to use them within VideoReDo which i also bought (and works great too!)

Now all i need to do is skip all the ads in real-time in Most Haunted Live and things would be great!

Maybe it works better in the US? I don't know how smartskip works so i dont know.

Any ideas.......

[flavius]

I use smartskip with The Simpsons. It's fairly accurate, but I wouldn't use this information to cut out commecials automatically, though..

[Chimera]

Smartskip seems to depend greatly on which channel you are recording. For instance, Discovery and MTV seem to be almost perfect every time for me, but BTV never gets ABC or CBS right. I don't know what system BTV uses for detecting commercials, probably something to do with black screens as described above, but I wish it was a tweakable setting, ideally by channel.

[jcohen]

I find that Smartskip actually works quite well in the US. BeyondTV skips 90-95% of commercials. When it fails, it either misses a 3 minute segment of commercials or misses the last commercial in the segment so that if I skip 30 seconds ahead it will play the program where it should have begun. I haven't had any problems with it skipping parts of the program. I think you are right about Smartskip working better on some channels over others. 30 minute shows on Disney often have missed commercial segments, whereas entire 2 hour movies on other channels manage to catch all commercial segments.

Channels that work well for me: FX, Family, TNT, NBC

Channels that don't work that well: Disney