[jimmyjam352]

Hey everyone... still trying to iron out the last few wrinkles of my setup and I'm more and more pleased each day. Here's something that's confusing me though...

How does the commercial skipping work? I have NextPVR as the backend with Comskip setup and commercials seem to skip just fine from there. However, if I watch the same TV show in Kodi (Helix), no commercials are skipped. Is there a setting I need to turn on somewhere in Kodi to allow this?

The more I read on this subject, the more confused I get. It seems like Kodi supports EDL files out-of-the-box, but then I come across this Wiki article (Edit_decision_list (wiki)) that makes me even more confused. According to that, commercial skipping is broken in Gotham (not sure if this also means Helix as well), but you can use Comskip EDL text files for now. I see that NextPVR is automatically creating both types of files (EDL and TXT), so should Kodi then just work and if so, what might I be doing wrong?

Thanks for your help!

-- Jim

[kmarq]

Kodi does not support an EDL file over an HTTP stream which is what the NextPVR addon uses.

[dgeezer]

There are a couple ways to make comskip work. However as stated above, it won't work in the standard NPVR Kodi addon.

1. Use an Npvr add-on called imagegrablite to rename your files to a Kodi friendly format. This is added in the post processing.bat after comskip. Here is my file as a sample:

@echo off
cd /d "C:\Users\Public\NPVR\Comskip"
hiderun comskip %1
"C:\Program Files (x86)\NPVR\imageGrabLite.exe" --oid %3 --rename --nfo


Then once your files are scanned into Kodi you can play them from the TV Library and comskip will work.

2. Use the X-newa plugin instead of the kodi pvr front end. If you record to a drive letter ie D:\NPVR_Recordings you will have to add a path substitution to your advancedsettings.xml in your userdata folder so that Kodi can find your comskip files

Here's mine:

<advancedsettings>
<pathsubstitution>
<substitute>
<from>D:/NPVR_Record/</from>
<to>smb://192.168.1.14/NPVR_Record/</to>
</substitute>
</pathsubstitution>
</advancedsettings>

[jimmyjam352]

Wow, that some interesting stuff, dgeezer - that gives me some options to consider. Thanks for your help!

[ReplayHarry]

I discovered this issue as well (not being able to directly skip commercials from the Live TV mode in Kodi). The easy get around was to "add source" under videos which is the directory that your recorded TV Shows are in. In my case that is d:\Recorded TV. Then I set that up as a favorite. Once a favorite I can add it to the main Kodi menu as "Recorded TV". Skips perfectly. Well, as we know, not 100%, but maybe 90% on most shows. You do have to have edl set properly in the Comskip ini file. Only thing you loose by this process is when you are looking at your shows in the list, it does not give you the show description information. Also the art work may not be there. But once you add it once, it is there from now on.

[jimmyjam352]

That's an interesting one, ReplayHarry - I was toying with the X-newa plugin, but your method might be a little more toward what I need. I'll give it a shot - thanks!!

[dgeezer]

ReplayHarry, sorry I wasn't real clear in my post. If you do what you're doing now and use the imagegrablite plugin in my method #1 it will either change the name of the recording to something that kodi understands or create an .nfo file for the recording. Then you can add this as a video source, like you are doing now,and pick TV library category and as the the TVDB as the scanning source. Then all your recordings will automatically show up on the main menu as TV Shows. You should get show information and artwork this way.

You're right about the setting in the config.ini file. You need to add this line to the end of the file:

edl_skip_field=3

[ReplayHarry]

ReplayHarry, sorry I wasn't real clear in my post. If you do what you're doing now and use the imagegrablite plugin in my method #1 it will either change the name of the recording to something that kodi understands or create an .nfo file for the recording. Then you can add this as a video source, like you are doing now,and pick TV library category and as the the TVDB as the scanning source. Then all your recordings will automatically show up on the main menu as TV Shows. You should get show information and artwork this way.

You're right about the setting in the config.ini file. You need to add this line to the end of the file:

edl_skip_field=3

Thanks for the info. I will give this a try later today. I must admit, it would be nice to have all the show information. Only had my HTPC up and running for about 18 months now and I learn something on this forum frequently. I'd never go back to ReplayTV (never never to Tivo), as Kodi is far superior to either in my opinion. I keep doing little things to make it better. If I can make your suggestion work for me, it will improve my experience even more.
Thanks again for the info.

[jimmyjam352]

Guys, I'm now really intrigued by this... so ReplayHarry, just to be clear, if I want to make this work, I can follow your option 1 with imagegrablite plus follow dgeezer's part about adding the recorded TV shows directory to Kodi and the magic should then happen?

[EDIT] Also, do I choose the TV Shows scraper with Local Information Only (.nfo)?

Thanks for the help!

[ReplayHarry]

ReplayHarry, sorry I wasn't real clear in my post. If you do what you're doing now and use the imagegrablite plugin in my method #1 it will either change the name of the recording to something that kodi understands or create an .nfo file for the recording. Then you can add this as a video source, like you are doing now,and pick TV library category and as the the TVDB as the scanning source. Then all your recordings will automatically show up on the main menu as TV Shows. You should get show information and artwork this way.

You're right about the setting in the config.ini file. You need to add this line to the end of the file:

edl_skip_field=3

Well, I got imagegrablite installed and finally setup to try this. It renamed the files just fine (Showname.SxxExx.etc.etc). No nfo file was created (I guess because it found the show in TVDB) ok. But... in the standard XBMC TV Shows, I get artwork and descriptions of the series, but when I select the series (Love Boat was my test case as it was "handy") I see no files and no descriptions of anything. I just see ... , which I can select to go back. I did try a "clean" library, and "update" library, still no luck.

Because I already have a source setup as "Recorded TV" with the original NPVR filenames (showname_date_time.ts), do I need to delete the source and re-add the source for this to work? I like the idea of having my show descriptions for each individual episode, but just can't get it to work. I know I am off somewhere, but not sure where at this point.


----- update ---

Interesting thing, I was using the IGL parameters of oid %3 --rename --nfo --zap2it when I got the results above. I took out the rename part and things started showing up. In fact they are right in my Recorded TV directory without having to do anything regarding sources for TV Shows. Only thing I am having now is an issue with Kodi thinking there are 2 episodes in that one file due to the date/time start and ends being confused as episodes. So seems there would be a benefit of actually renaming the file if I can get it to work.

More later. Doing a little more experimentation.

---- update 3/21/15 ----

Well, I guess I will leave things as they are now. When renaming the files, I still could never get Kodi to accept them into the library. I never could figure out what I was doing wrong, but with the .nfo files, they come right in and I get the artwork and show descriptions just as expected. Thanks dgeezer for getting me turned on to imagegrablite also thanks to emveepee for that imagegrablite utility. If we didn't have all those Kodi contributors, things would be much tougher on us. The last piece was that advancedsettings tweek from emveepee that got rid of Kodi thinking there were 2 episodes in the file.

So only thing I am going to do further on this is to use pkscout's trigger xbmc library update program so that it executes as the last step in my postprocessing.bat file. That way I won't have to manually update the library after imagegrablite does it's thing.

I keep making little improvements in my Kodi setup, but I think I now have it just about where I want it.
Thanks again to all those who have helped me along the way.

[chairmanfaust]

just came across this thread and was wondering what the status is?

I have Kodi 15, NextPVR 3.4.8 and comskip 81_77.

I can see that comskip is working when i schedule a recording, it generates a bunch of files (.dif, .edl, .log, .logo.txt, .vdr, and .txt) which all have something in them

1) Kodi doesnt pick up my recordings until i restart it
2) When I added my recorded TV as a folder, the shows still had commercials... I'm using the latest donator version but I was curious if there was something I'm missing here? Kodi seems to be ignoring the txt files

I made sure the comskip.ini has output_edl=1 and edl_skip_field=3

[ReplayHarry]

just came across this thread and was wondering what the status is?

I have Kodi 15, NextPVR 3.4.8 and comskip 81_77.

I can see that comskip is working when i schedule a recording, it generates a bunch of files (.dif, .edl, .log, .logo.txt, .vdr, and .txt) which all have something in them

1) Kodi doesnt pick up my recordings until i restart it
2) When I added my recorded TV as a folder, the shows still had commercials... I'm using the latest donator version but I was curious if there was something I'm missing here? Kodi seems to be ignoring the txt files

I made sure the comskip.ini has output_edl=1 and edl_skip_field=3

Are you watching your shows in Kodi's TV Show (library) mode or in files mode (Recorded TV)? Skipping commercials only works in file mode.

[chairmanfaust]

Are you watching your shows in Kodi's TV Show (library) mode or in files mode (Recorded TV)? Skipping commercials only works in file mode.

Turns out there is a forthcoming update to pvr.nextpvr.dll in the NextPVR addon that fixes the problem with recordings not showing up until kodi is restarted...

the problem with comskip turns out to be what you describe, it works when playing from my 'video' location but not from the tv -> recording location and as was mentioned earlier this is a Kodi limitation as nextpvr does an http stream to kodi which doesnt pick up the comskip files via that method... shame though... that would be gravy

[ReplayHarry]

Glad you're good.
I'm back on Gotham as I had too many issue with Helix and Issy. So I wasn't experiencing the restart to pick up episodes that you mentioned. Gotham still works perfectly. I wish they had left it alone. But eventually I will upgrade as I am sure they will correct some of the issues with the latest version. It's funny, sometimes when you make a change to improve things, you generate a new problem too. I've wrote code a lot over the years and I must admit it has happened to me. But things eventually get fixed.
Have a great day and enjoy your Kodi experience.

[theplayer02]

Hi, i started to use comskip also, as it sounds promising.

I tested it with one recording, but i can't get Kodi to use the infos from the EDL file.

So i see the original recording as ts file. Plus a bunch of other files including log and edl.
If i try to play the video through TV - recordings (sorry roughly translated to english) commercials there.
If i try to play it through Video - Files there are still commercials.

Somewhere i do something wrong, but i can not clearly see what.

So i Use Kodi 15.1 with nextpvr 3.4.8 (second update) and comskip 81_83.
Someone some ideas?

If i look at the recoding in nextpvr the commercial skip is there. *g*