ShowAnalyzer, DirMon2, and SageTV Setup

Welcome! This thread will eventually contain a complete tutorial on how to setup ShowAnalyzer and DirMon2, in order to detect commercials on your DVR, and a little information about using the generated files with SageTV.

I've had several people ask myself, as well as, seen many a thread postings, on how to setup commercial detection, and use it with SageTV. This thread will concentrate mainly on getting ShowAnalyzer and DirMon2 setup to detect commercials, and is based on the paid version of SA (additional steps are required for the free version of SA, since you will have to use the free decoders). I have chosen SageMC 16x9 as my STV for SageTV, which happens to have built-in support for commercial skipping.

What Computer Do I Install DirMon2 and ShowAnalyzer:

A few people have asked, "where should I setup DirMon2 and ShowAnalyzer, on my server, or client?" The answer is really where YOU want it to be. I only have one machine that I use for SageTV, and currently, DM2 and SA reside on that machine. However, you could put DM2 and SA on any machine on your network, so long as it has access to the drive and directory where your recordings are installed. I have not tried this, but for instance, you could have a home office computer setup to process your commercial files, without even having SageTV installed on it. This is because DM2 and SA do not interact with SageTV directly, but only through the generated commercial skip file (TXT or EDL). So, as long as you setup your directories and access correctly, you could have it on either client or server. For the case of this question though, I'd say if you are running your server headless, you'll probably want to put DM2 and SA on that computer, and keep your client processing power for video, etc.

Here we go. Let's start with ShowAnalyzer (frequently referred to as SA).

***Please bear with me on the screen captures. I am having to figure out what resolution works best with these.***

ShowAnalyzer Configuration:

Goto Start>>All Programs>>DragonGlobal>>ShowAnalyzer>>Configure ShowAnalyzer

Global Settings
There are a lot of settings located here, and at first, it can overwhelm you a bit. Generally, there are two types of files being used for commercial skipping, a TXT type file, or an EDL type file. Both contain the same information, although using different methods. EDL has been known to be the more reliable format.

For TXT files, you'll want to enable "GB-PVR or SageTV," and tell it when to create the file (more on this later). For EDL files, you'll want to enable "MPlayer," and also tell it when to create the file. You do not need both, and in fact, I would only use one.

"When to create," tells SA when you want to create the file, either at the beginning of a show (for use when you want live commercial detection, such as, watching a show 15 minutes after it has started), or at the end of the show.

Now, if you want totally transparent operation of SA, and don't care to see the work it's doing, I'd highly recommend using Invisible Mode (in the Interface section). This keeps SA from opening a console window, among other things, which can possibly steal focus from your PVR software, such as SageTV.

Throttling (set in %) is a very nice feature of SA, which can allow you to keep SA under control, while you are doing other tasks with the CPU. Keep in mind, that this throttle control is PER instance of SA. For instance, if you allow 4 instances of SA to run at a time, and you set the throttle to 25%, guess what? No CPU cycles left for your other processes, if 4 shows happen to need processing at the same time. SA tends to be pretty nice to other processes...but I still like to throttle mine. You can also set a time for when it should do the throttling.



Global Webserver
I'm currently going to skip this section, due to the fact that most of the settings are self explainitory, and that I'm currently not using this feature.

Global Auto Settings
Same as above. These settings are used in conjuction with the Webserver to setup profiles for different channels/favorites, in case you happen to have a channel, for instance, that does not have commercials, and you do not want SA to process it.

Default Settings
This is where the tweaking takes place. You can see how I've set mine up in the screen capture. I've found that these settings generally work for most of my shows. There is one particular HD channel that I end up not getting any commercial detection on, but I cannot recall which one it is. Most of these settings are default.

Commercial Padding allows you to move the beginning and/or end of a commercial mark around. This is useful, if you get consistant results, but the skip is just slightly too early/late, and the ending is too early/late.

Predetermined Marks is another interesting feature. Before this feature was implimented, I was frequently missing the "preview" for the next episode of certain shows, because SA would mark it as a commercial. I've got mine setup to where SA will not mark the beginning and end 3 minutes of every show.



That's pretty much the setup for SA. There, easy, huh? Don't forget to register SA, if you haven't already done so.

DirMon2 Configuration:

Goto Start>>All Programs>>DragonGlobal>>DirMon2>>DirMon2 GUI

Job Management (Tab)
When you first get in here, you'll notice there are no current job profiles setup in DirMon2 (DM2). Click the "New" button in the lower left corner to add a new job. Title it "ShowAnalyzer."



Below is a screen capture of my current DM2 settings for launching SA.



* You need to tell it where the files are located, that you want SA to process.
* Browse to the SA executable file.
* Targets tell DM2 what files to look for when in that directory.
* "When" is the important one:
** Resources Required: This is what I talked about back in the SA setup. Out of 100%, I have each instance of SA setup to use 50% of the resources, which means, I can have a total of 2 instances of SA running at once. If you change that to 25, then you can have 4 instances.
** Triggers: This tells DM2 what condition it should launch SA on. My setup first looks for mpg files, if it finds one, it then checks to see if an edl file with the same file name, exists, if not, then it launches SA on that file.
** There are little check boxes here, in case you want to make sure that the file is done recording before starting SA. I like live detection, so I don't have these set. If your machine has problems running SA and recording at the same time, you might need to play around with these.
** Blackout: You can use this feature to keep DM2 from launching any SA intances, for instance, during the day, while you are home watching TV. You might not want SA processing files for some reason. Using this feature allows you to launch SA only when your system is idle, for instance, while you are at work.

***Notice, at the very bottom left corner, a button called "Validate." This button will generally check your settings to see if they are idiot proof. It does not garantee that everything will work, but generally catches errors commonly made.

Global Settings (Tab)
Global is where you tell DM2 how many available resources it has, this goes back to how many instances of a given task you want running. I leave this to 100, to make it easy to deal with. You can change the time in seconds, that DM2 polls your directories to check for new files to process. Depending on how fast you want SA to respond to new files, you need to set this low. 3 minutes, means that it could possibly take 3 minutes into a recording, before it would see that it has that recording to process (important for live TV detection).

Cleanup. This is where you tell DM2 what to clean up, if your specified file does not exist. Examples are in my screen capture. Click the Add button, and it's pretty easy to follow from there.

Service. This is tricky. In order to run the service, I believe you have to use the user name and password of the account being used on the system. You also need to make sure that user has the rights to be able to run services. Once you have this setup correctly, the order of the 4 buttons on the right should go like this:

First, it should look like the screen capture, and say, "Not Installed."
Click Install, and it should change to, "Stopped."
Click Start, and it should change to, "Started."



Current Status (Tab)
When everything is running, this is where you should see jobs pop up to be processed.



This pretty much ends the DirMon2 setup.

More to come on SageTV/SageMC.

* Reserved. *

* Reserved Part 2. *

* Reserved Part 3. *

[mdnttoker]

The only setting I've had problems with so far is the Blackout period. It seems that whenever I try using this feature it either isn't enforced or SA fails to start once the blackout period is over.

Am I doing this right?

Enabled:
Start: 1700
End: 2330

I want the blackout period to start at 5pm and end at 11:30pm.

Is this correct? Do I have to restart the Dirmon service to get this to run?

Thanks,
Dan

It appears I'm not subscribed to my own thread...LOL.

I believe that setting should work. And, just for making things work sake, I usually always "Stop, Uninstall, Install, and Start" after making any changes.

I'd give that a try if you haven't already...

[mdnttoker]

Originally Posted by geogecko

It appears I'm not subscribed to my own thread...LOL.

I believe that setting should work. And, just for making things work sake, I usually always "Stop, Uninstall, Install, and Start" after making any changes.

I'd give that a try if you haven't already...

Heh...thanks for the reply gecko.

Yes, the above does work. My problem was not stopping and re-starting the service.

Thanks for the guide!

-Dan

Glad you got it working. Not sure what the problem is with notification. It doesn't seem to notify me of any threads right now, even though I have instant notification turned on, on every thread I'm subscribed to?!