[mythtvnz] Non-myth frontend; commflagging?

[Stephen Worthington]

On Wed, 9 Dec 2009 11:10:51 +1300, you wrote:

>Hi guys, I don't use a MythTV frontend for watching programmes, I just
>use the myth backend to record them, and then ship the recorded file
>directly to a PopcornHour player over NFS.
>
>I see that by default Myth is doing commflagging on everything ... so
>I was wondering, how reliable is it, and how should I go about taking
>advantage of this for my playbacks? Will it detect the beginning/end
>of a programme as well as the breaks within it?
>
>For some programmes, I'd happily just cut the advert breaks out
>completely, and keep a single play-straight-through file.
>For others, keeping the original file would be nice, but having
>'chapters' so I can skip over them entirely with the ">>|" next button
>would be good.
>
>It doesn't matter to me whether the task is run from within myth (user
>job?) or from the command-line later ... so any news about how to do
>this will be welcome!
>
>-jim

The flagging is not particularly reliable at all.  It depends on the
channel and how they go about handling their logos and intros to
programs after ad breaks.  National Geographic channel, for example,
seems to work reasonably well.  TV1 and TV3 rarely do, at least from
DVB-T.  I have not really had long enough using the flagging in 0.22
to give any authoritative answers though.  Now that you ask the
question, I think that the beginning and ending of programs are rarely
flagged.

The flagging is stored (like most things) in the mythconverg database.
If your MySQL database is set up to be externally accessible, any
other box with the right software could access and use the flagging
data.  I seriously doubt that anything other than mythfrontend does
that though.

With mythfrontend, you can set an auto skip option for ads, but I have
never tried it as the flagging is far too unreliable.  There is also a
way of "transcoding" where you tell the frontend to use the flagging
to cut out all the ad breaks.  It does no trancoding actually - it
just copies the data as is around the ad breaks that are to be cut
out.  Again, I have never used it for the same reason.  You can, I
believe, get it to set the flagged cut points and then manually edit
them, but that is a pretty time consuming thing to do so you would
only ever do it for a special reason, rather than on any regular
basis.