using smartskip?

[nba1341]

I was wondering how to use smart skip. Like I have it generate immeditaley and when i go to whatch the show it shows like commericials in a different color blue but it doesnt skip them. How do i like delete them out of the recorded file?

[btvfreak]

You need to use the up arrow on the keyboard or the Firefly to skip those blue blocks. Smartskip isn't 100% accurate, but is still pretty good. You can try using IGCutter. Client programs to do mpeg editing are VideoRedo or Womble.

[nanook105]

What are you using to control playback (keyboard, remote) ? If you are using a keyboard the up/down arrows skip to the end/begining of the current section (marked or unmarked) With the firefly the up/down arrows around the OK button do the same thing.

[Rich A]

Originally Posted by nba1341

I was wondering how to use smart skip. Like I have it generate immeditaley and when i go to whatch the show it shows like commericials in a different color blue but it doesnt skip them. How do i like delete them out of the recorded file?

You can't delete them. The way it works is when you see a commercial start, hit the up arrow button on your remote. It should then instantly jump to the commercial end. There's been a lot of talk about "auto-skip" and such during it's early days of development. Many of us preferred to keep it manual. It's no big deal to just hit a button to skip. In my case I would rather have manual control because although it's pretty accurate it's not perfect. Sometimes it might miss a commercial and sometimes it might mark part of the wanted show as a commercial. By giving you control over it, you never have to worry about the thing accidently skipping a portion of the show. It's accuracy will depend a lot on the channel content and the quality of your signal. You may notice sometimes you might have to let about 1 or 2 seconds of the commercial play before you hit the up arrow button. If you are too fast, it might seek to just a few frames into the commercial instead of the end.

I've had several ReplayTV boxes over the years (like a TIVO) and I must say the accuracy of the commercial skip with the BTV product is slightly better.

There are plugins available that will auto cut and edit the shows for you. Because the marking of the commercials is very hard to do, there is always a couple spots that aren't accurate. When I use the mpegs to archive shows to DVD, I use an Mpeg editor and hand edit the commercials out. This insures perfect cut points. But for general viewing just mashing that up arrow at the start of a commercial is pretty quick.

Look for the auto cut plugin in the plug in forum.

[stinhoutx]

For the shows I plan to archive, I don't even use the smart skip any longer to relieve my machine of the queued workload. Instead, I am having great success with VideoReDo Plus and the jog controls in conjunction with the Ad-Detective. By jumping around to the sections just before commercials, Ad-Detective zips right through marking the transitions. Alternatively, Ad-Detective can run through a half-hour show in about a minute or so (may be dependent on your machine). It's not a cost-free solution, but it works very well for me.

By not having as many items in the SmarkSkip queue, the shows we are only capturing to watch later are more likely to be ready for us to take advantage of the SmartSkip while watching.

[Rich A]

Originally Posted by stinhoutx

For the shows I plan to archive, I don't even use the smart skip any longer to relieve my machine of the queued workload. Instead, I am having great success with VideoReDo Plus and the jog controls in conjunction with the Ad-Detective. By jumping around to the sections just before commercials, Ad-Detective zips right through marking the transitions. Alternatively, Ad-Detective can run through a half-hour show in about a minute or so (may be dependent on your machine). It's not a cost-free solution, but it works very well for me.

By not having as many items in the SmarkSkip queue, the shows we are only capturing to watch later are more likely to be ready for us to take advantage of the SmartSkip while watching.

I gotta tell ya, I read this:

"By not having as many items in the SmarkSkip queue, the shows we are only capturing to watch later are more likely to be ready for us to take advantage of the SmartSkip while watching"

about 20 times .. and I'm still not sure I understand it.

But I in my case I was worried about system over-head etc., created by having Smart Skip enabled for everything. I tried it both ways. Frankly it doesn't even hiccup when I have it turned on "Always" and "Generate immediately. And I'm often recording three shows at the same time. I really don't think it uses as much over-head as we may think it does. This might be more of an issue with a very underpowered machine, like a 120 MHz Pentium I or something. Or if you do a lot of show squeezing (which I never do) But even then I'm pretty sure the way the program is designed, the show squeezing is throttled back to use less CPU during times of high activity.

A good thing to check would be just how long it takes for a typical one hour show to be "smartly skipped". Heh heh .. I love it .. I think I'll check it tonight .. maybe there's reference to it in the log or a debug view where we can see how many minutes it takes. With my machine set to Always On, and Generate immediately .. the function is available for use pretty quickly after the show had finished recording.

I'm curious. Do you do a lot of show squeezing? And when you did generate smart skip, did you choose to have it done later rather than immediately?

I originally had mine set to only do it later. Which meant it wasn't ready an hour after the show recorded. I switched to "generate immediately" and it's never missed a beat.

[trellaine201]

Hmm i thought i had this set up properly for smart skip, but when I playback recordings I see no such different colored bars?

How do I set up smart skip?

Thanks