Schoolhouse sees Coms Ok but SA is missing up to 1/3rd of them

[SteveM]

All my content is OTA HD. SA seems to find most commercials no problem, except at the very beginning of the show. The intro segment and such. The first commercials caught may be 10-12 minutes in to the show.

[cmhughes]

I'm only getting SD, but am having the same problem. SA creates a near-empty .edl file, which is seen by the Sage Comskip plugin and marks the show as "comskipped". However, there is nothing in it. SH run with the same settings seems to find the commercials nearly perfectly. Once I run SH it rewrites the .edl file, but I didn't buy SA so that I would have to run SH manually. So what gives???

[HT Slider]

Originally Posted by cmhughes

I'm only getting SD, but am having the same problem. SA creates a near-empty .edl file, which is seen by the Sage Comskip plugin and marks the show as "comskipped". However, there is nothing in it. SH run with the same settings seems to find the commercials nearly perfectly. Once I run SH it reqrites the .edl file, but I didn't buy SA so that I would have to run SH manually. So what gives???

I don't know what is going on. I've sent e-mails to Dragon Global tech support and posted here for many, many months.

EDIT: Reading Jerr's blog, it appears that he was unavailable and in the Navy for several months, but now he is back. Hopefully this is good for both Jerr and the rest of us.

I've just installed SA 9.5 but it too seems to be hit and miss with HD content. Reanalyzing some of the shows to compare, 9.5 is able to find an extra commercial here and there, but still not all of them. I haven't tried SH yet, but I assume it is still able to 100% accurately detecting commercials using the same settings.

Since we got HD we've had to manually skip commercials when watching HD shows at least 50% of the time. If we want to truly have it automatically skip commercials I have been running School House manually without changing any settings and this has absolutely always detected all commercials properly.

There is also a strange 5-9 second offset in commercial detection with SA that isn't there with SH with some shows. Basically it skips 5-9 seconds into the commercial and annoyingly skips 5-9 seconds past where the show starts. This isn't fixed with SA 9.5 either. This happens with roughly 40% of the HD recordings, especially longer ones like movies. Often the first commercial detected doesn't have this offset, but all of the rest do. Again SH gets it right every time (at least before I installed 9.5 it did so I assume it will with 9.5 too).

I wonder if there is a command line way to use School House instead of Show Analyzer for automated commercial detection?

[HT Slider]

Does anyone know if SA and SH use the same graph to decode the recording?

One theory I've had is SA and SH might use different codecs for decoding and there may be subtle differences between the two causing SA not to work properly.

[HT Slider]

BTW, Jerr is aware of this bug as demonstrated in this older thread:

http://www.dragonglobal.org/forums/showthread.php?t=601

Jerr, if you are reading this, can you please give us an update on this ussue?

Is there a work around that works with SA 9.5?

Thank you.

[HT Slider]

Here is another thread where the same issue is discussed:

http://www.dragonglobal.org/forums/showthread.php?t=663

In here, Jerr suggests that it is the specific DirectShow filter that is causing the issue.

I would be extremely interested in knowing which filters do a decent job with SA and which ones don't (keeping time accurate without drifting).

Can I insert a custom graph into SA for it to use for commercial detection?

Alternatively, if it uses the default DirectShow graph building rules, I could easily modify the merit settings on the various demux filters and codecs to make the best ones work.

How does SA build its graph?

[Jere_Jones]

Neither ShowAnalyzer nor SchoolHouse use any DirectShow technologies. All of the decoders and demuxers are custom coded.

What I was refering to was when you are playing the files back, some filters are better than others at jumping precisely.

Jere

[Jere_Jones]

Originally Posted by HT Slider

BTW, Jerr is aware of this bug as demonstrated in this older thread:

http://www.dragonglobal.org/forums/showthread.php?t=601

Jerr, if you are reading this, can you please give us an update on this ussue?

Is there a work around that works with SA 9.5?

Thank you.

SA, as it is released now, is almost at end of life. I am releasing bug fixes because, well, that's the type of guy I am. But my main focus is working on the next generation that won't have this issue and will support h.264. I'm hoping to have it out in mid-May (since that is when the new HD PVRs are supposed to hit the street).

Jere

[HT Slider]

Originally Posted by Jere_Jones

Neither ShowAnalyzer nor SchoolHouse use any DirectShow technologies. All of the decoders and demuxers are custom coded.

What I was refering to was when you are playing the files back, some filters are better than others at jumping precisely.Jere

Wow, you not only analyze the video but you actually write your own decoders and demuxers to get to the encrypted video!!!

I had no idea. I'm both impressed and surprised.

Why wouldn't you use regular DirectShow filters to feed your video analyser unencrypted, uncompressed digital video?

With this approach you'd be able to bring in video from absolutely any source as long as appropriate codecs were installed (and they obviously would be since your customers are able to view the video). Using DirectShow, you'd probably also improve the accuracy of the commercial timing since the same demux and codecs would be used for both analysis and playback.

Writing your own demuxers and decoders I would assume allows you to improve the efficiency, but this approach obviously limits the formats you can analyze and makes the software coding task much more complex.

Thinking about this a bit more I have more questions than answers...

If you write your own demux and decoders, why aren't the School House results the same as Show Analyzer results?

Is there anything we, the end user can do to align SH with SA and enable us to use SH to tune the settings for SA?

BTW, I installed SA 0.9.5 last night and I noticed that there have already been 6 SA crashes out of roughly 10 recordings that have been analysed.

Which is the best version for us to run currently? I was running 0.9.1 and although it didn't crash very often, it doesn't do as good a job with HD content as 0.9.5.

[Jere_Jones]

Originally Posted by HT Slider

If you write your own demux and decoders, why aren't the School House results the same as Show Analyzer results?

Because SA doesn't get a lot of the information that simply running it in SH gives. Do you notice that SH is much slower than SA? That is because SH is actually looking at every frame whereas SA normally just dips in where it thinks it needs to.

Originally Posted by HT Slider

Is there anything we, the end user can do to align SH with SA and enable us to use SH to tune the settings for SA?

The only thing that causes the diffence is the preselector threshold. That determines how much of the file SA takes a close look at. When SH is running that preselector is (in essence) slammed to the floor.

Originally Posted by HT Slider

BTW, I installed SA 0.9.5 last night and I noticed that there have already been 6 SA crashes out of roughly 10 recordings that have been analysed.

Yep. It is a regression bug in the closed caption summary calculator that I added when I was correcting some of the compiler warnings. Tomorrow will bring a better version.

Originally Posted by HT Slider

Which is the best version for us to run currently? I was running 0.9.1 and although it didn't crash very often, it doesn't do as good a job with HD content as 0.9.5.

I'd say 0.9.6 is the best version.

Jere