Need help using SchoolHouse to fix a problem

[woolooloo]

I recently purchased SA and use it with DVRMSToolbox for commercial skipping. Some shows it works great, others not so well. I'm trying to spend some time learning SchoolHouse to improve things, and I've read the other thread where someone gave some tips but it hasn't really helped for the file I am working on.

I have trouble with most NBC shows. It detects the commercials very well for the most part, but normally about once or twice a show, it will delete 15 or so seconds of content right before a commercial block. And since the stuff right before commercials is normally important to keep you tuned in, it really sucks to be losing that.

I'm hoping someone who understands this stuff can help me change the appropriate settings to fix this. I've attached screenshots of SH at various points in the problem area.

In the first image, 3a, this is right before what SA says is a divider. It properly recognizes this as show and it has a score of 1.5.

In the second image, 4a, this is right after the divider. I'm a bit confused here because I thought the green areas are supposed to be show and the red areas are commercials, but you can see it is green but the decision says commercial. I'm also confused why SA put a divider here since as you can see, very little has changed in the scene since the last shot. And despite the fact that very little has changed in the scene, the score has changed from 1.5 to 30.

In the third image, 5a, it is still show marked as commercial (both red and decision), very little has changed on the screen, so again, I'm unsure why a divider was inserted previously, score is 30.

The last image, 6a, is right after the next divider. As you can see, it is still show marked as commercial. Again, very little has changed from the past few frames and yet another divider was inserted. Score has gone up to 80.

Also, in about 5 seconds, well before the next divider, the screen will go black for a few seconds as the scene really does end, and it transitions to credits/commericials, and yet there is NO divider there.

Another thread said there is no way for us to change the positions of dividers using SH. If so, probably the best I can do is to get that one section with images 4a and 5a rescored so that it is show, then I will only lose a few seconds in this last section. However, I'm not sure what to do. I think the score changed so dramatically because the section is so short because of the improper divider placement, but what score modifiers would I mess with to fix this without screwing up the detection of other commercials?

And if we really can't change where the dividers go, I'd be glad to offer this sample up to the developer to improve divider placement.

In any case, thanks in advance for any help, I'm sure other people will appreciate the insight anyone can provide as well.

[Serra]

Originally Posted by woolooloo

And if we really can't change where the dividers go, I'd be glad to offer this sample up to the developer to improve divider placement.

In the basic guide I wrote, I said that you can't change the dividers, which is basically true, you can't make any modifications to SA that change where the dividers go. There are no divider tweaks.

However, there is one setting that you can change that will help work with the dividers. The "Preselector Threshold" will change how many dividers that SA will put in the show. This can go from bad to very bad very quickly, so changes this with great caution.

If there isn't a divider where it should be, lower the threashold until the divider you want shows up. Remember, that the more dividers, the more likely SA will think that show parts are commercials.

Also, some shows simply don't work at all in any comskip program, so it may not be possible to fix it. The program must be able to tell the difference between content and commercial.

[woolooloo]

Thanks for the tip Serra, I will give it a try and report back the results!

[woolooloo]

Well, I tried messing with the preselector threshold, but it didn't change the dividers that are causing my problems. I dropped the value from 60 incrementally all the way down to 5 and I lost a lot of important dividers but not what I would classify as these extraneous ones.

Playing with some other settings, I was able to get a lot of the extraneous dividers to go away by turning off "blank frame" dividers and turning on "scene change" dividers. The blank frame dividers don't seem to be doing what I would expect them to do - detect when the screen goes blank. So I'm not sure what is going on.

Unfortunately, this change to "scene change" dividers is not detecting as many of the commercials, so it is a trade off. I may play with comskip and see if I can get better results and try SA again with the next release.

[Serra]

Originally Posted by woolooloo

Unfortunately, this change to "scene change" dividers is not detecting as many of the commercials, so it is a trade off. I may play with comskip and see if I can get better results and try SA again with the next release.

One of the issues is that the channel you are recording needs to follow the FCC guidelines. I've noticed a few channels aren't leaving the blank space between the content and the commercials when they switch to local commercials. I'm guessing it isn't by design, just that the guy at the station might be manually queuing up the commercials. This is a major issue for any commercial detection because that is one of the keys to detection.

Unfortunately, this is an issue that changing programs will not solve.

[Rain~Bow]

Dear Serra, you are so competent, I've got to ask you in specific

I'm fine-tuning my ShowAnalyzer with SchoolHouse and I would like to shortcut the playing around with the settings.

Now, the only thing I can read is the measured loudness etc. of the block (which isn't so much of help) and the score of the block (which helps a little).


But if I knew why this block got it's specific score, than I could decide which values to in/decrease - do you understand my problem? Doesn't a feature like this exist?

Thank you!

br,
Simon


EDIT: I have very very good results with MPEG now! Yesterday with DVR-MS it was a pain in the ass but now it's good.