Commercial Removal from WTV Recordings 2

Posted by JD 10/20/2011 at 10:00

For the last 5 yrs or so, I've been using a group of tools to process TV recordings to remove commercials and then convert them from MPEG into something more efficient for storage.  Complicated scripts were used to feed the inputs and outputs between the different tools; going from the recorded format – mpeg2 – comskip – cutter – transcoder – closed caption dumper – container.  A $46 upgrade to one of the existing tools has changed most of that.  The best part is that subtitles and closed captions aren't harmed and the audio track to be included in the output file can be selected.  WTVConverter.exe doesn't let us select the audio track. Usually, that isn't a problem, but sometimes it really is.

New Processing

The new processing steps are:   Recorded format – commercial cutter – transcoder – container.  This new version can read WTV files and create comskip-like markers in companion files, remove unwanted scenes with frame level accuracy, and transcode the output without leaving the tool.  The transcode to MKV/h.264 is slow and doesn't have all the options that handbrake does, but for a Windows user, it could make sense.  The newer version also supports outputing DVD ISO files and has many presets for portable devices. It also handled TiVo created files.

New Tool

The tool is VideoReDo TVSuite V4.  Don't think of this as an advertisement. I'm just a mostly happy customer.  The tool isn't perfect. It crashes at the File | Save dialog a few times a day. I'm certain to save my project file often.  It comes with sample cscript files and programs to batch convert inputs into the desired outputs.  It took me about 20 minutes to create a perl script to call the ad-finder script for every WTV file in a directory and create .VPrj files for each.  This method saves a WTV-DVRMS file conversion so it is quicker and converting a 17GB file would require 34GB total. Not anymore.  Because I'd purchased v2.5 of VideoReDo Plus about $50 was cut from the TVSuite price.  I'd been considering this tool for about a year.  I gave it a trial in July, but didn't have a compelling reason to upgrade then.

Closed Captions

I'm trying to improve my Español language comprehension. A good way to do this is to have CC, Closed Captioning, enabled in Spanish and English.  The local Spanish language channels put Spanish captions on CC1 and English on CC3.  Most other tools I've found do not handle CC3 or CC4 at all.  TVSuite does.  I smiled after converting my first telenovele to MPEG2 with all commercials removed then used VLC to select CC3 during playback for the English captions. It was beautiful.

I still need to find a good way to get CC1 and CC3 with h.264 video into an MKV container.  TVSuite may do this, I haven't had the patience to wait for a transcode on this slow Windows hardware to complete.  Also, none of the other devices I use for video playback read CC3 from MPEG2 streams.  CCExtractor on Linux handles CC1 and CC2 flawlessly, but not CC3 – at least on with version v0.55.  There is a note about a Line21 patch that got lost on the project homepage – I think that's CC3.  I know that VLC handles it, so it must be possible.  The project team appears to be frustrated.  Regardless, v.59 is up with some bug fixes.  There are some MS-Windows specific CC tools available, but they appear too ugly to me.

  1. Erik 11/07/2011 at 13:30

    Comskip can now process .wtv files directly

  2. JD 11/07/2011 at 14:30

    Thanks for the pointer @Erik.

    A little google-fu found
    Changes in 0.81.011
    - Complete change of the used codecs and demux. Comskip will now process everything ffmpeg can decode. Due to the experimental nature certain features have stopped working. Most noticable (sic) is: NO LIVE TV SUPPORT!!!!

    I don’t really use comskip (love the tool, but TV Suite has commercial finding built-in). Interested folks who donate can get access to the early release comskip version which includes WTV support If you do use comskip (huge time saver), please consider donating $20. Think of the many hours and hours of commercials you didn’t have to watch this year or next or the yr after that because of comskip? Isn’t $20 worth that convenience? Comskip can write skip-files that XBMC reads. You would buy the guy a beer, right? There’s no set amount on the donation to gain access to the early release code, even $5 or $10 sends a big thank you to the author. Further, you know exactly how well the software works already, so it isn’t like a game you paid $30 for and never used.

    TV Suite v4 isn’t always able to properly save content without filtering out some of the bad resolution changes (usually commercials) in some recordings. About 50% of the time, I’m forced to strip the WTV container away using QSF to remove all frames from a video that isn’t in a specific resolution. That leaves just the 720p or 1080i video frames and then the commercial finding routines need to be re-run.
    Here’s the TV Suite v4 AdFinder script invocation from a perl script that I use:

    cscript //nologo \“C:\\Program Files (x86)\\VideoReDoTVSuite4\\AdScan.vbs\” \“$in_wtv\” \“$out_vprj\” /q

    • $in_wtv is the full path to the WTV file. Relative path does not work. DVR-MS and MPG files can also be input.
    • $out_vprj is the desired VideoRedo TV Suite cut-file which will be created.
      This command replaces what comskip does. TV Suite is a commercial product. Comskip is much more tunable and I honestly prefer FLOSS over commercial software. If it weren’t for the need to easily cut files while retaining CC3 streams, I wouldn’t own TV Suite.