Kodi Community Forum

Hi everyone,

I've read here and though there are explanations of how ad skipping works I can't get a predictable or reliable behavior from Kodi and was hoping someone with some inside knowledge could share their understanding of it please.

As an overview I'm using the latest Kodi for Windows (Jarvis 16.0) though as it's been the same for the previous 2 versions of Kodi I don't believe it's version specific. Here is the format of the files I get from comskip:

(txt file)


(edl file)


With these I get different behaviors for different recordings using these files. That itself varies dependent upon whether I have the txt or edl file - or both present. It can also vary between and within recordings.

The behaviors I see are:

- seeking ahead 10 or 30 minutes instead stops at the next commercial break
- for some programs (and even within the same one) commercials are sometimes automatically skipped and sometimes not
- requesting a commercial is skipped can result in a 10 second pause before it recommences playing. This can be avoided by pressing pause and play immediately after the skip button

Does anyone understand what the variables are which control this, if the behavior is intended?

Thank you!

As noted on the page, EDL support is partially broken. Most likely this has only gotten worse since v13, as no one has shown any interest (or has not has time) finding the cause. I meant to try and help out myself, hunting down what change might have broken it (I'm not a dev, so that's all I can really do), but it's been a low priority :/

What we should do is see if this is just the same .edl (mplayer's version) bug, or if it has gotten worse and is affecting .txt-types as well. You mention you have both for some recordings? Do you have issues for ones that only use .txt?

Thanks for your reply - it's not consistent with just a txt file either.

I went away from .edl and then back to it at some point and then realised I had both. But when I had only the .txt as output I would still occasionally get the pause - though not the automatic skipping from memory. I briefly tested it and didn't get the pause but the infrequency means that isn't definitive. I might go back to just .txt output and see how it goes again over a longer period.