Introduction

The Commdetect server is a helper daemon that will remove commercials from streams once the recording process has finished. Like the Recordserver and Encodingserver it is a standalone persistent process that runs separately from the main freevo application, and likewise does not have to be running on the local machine.

As a rough estimate, on a 2ghz PC with 512MB RAM it takes about forty minutes to an hour to detect and remove commercials from a one hour show. For a little more info see the users list thread "Commercial skipping/removal in 1.7.3"

Note that mplayer has a bug with the way it calculates the time position in MPEG TS streams (such as DVB), meaning legitimate parts of the program may skip. The commercial detection isn't necessarily wrong - the bug causes mplayer to skip in the wrong places. This link has more discussion of the problem.

Setup

Prerequisites

For commercial detection to work you'll need at least Mplayer-1.0rc1 or newer

Configuration

First we must enable commercial detection in local_conf.py (taken from this mailing list post):

Freevo <= 1.7.3:

REMOVE_COMMERCIALS = 'True'

Freevo >= 1.7.4:

TV_RECORD_REMOVE_COMMERCIALS = 'True'

Then configure the commercial detection server:

COMMDETECTSERVER_UID = 0
COMMDETECTSERVER_GID = 0

COMMDETECTSERVER_IP = 'localhost'
COMMDETECTSERVER_PORT = 6667

Set these final values as appropriate for your situation (e.g. if you're running the commdetect server on a different host/port)

Starting the Commdetect Server

Manually

Execute the following line:

freevo commdetectserver start

Automatically

This is a Gentoo hack to start the commdetectserver with freevo using the freevoboot script (init script use is discouraged):

Add the following to the bottom of /etc/conf.d/freevo:

# Start the commdetect server. Possible values are "no" and "yes".

commdetectserver="yes"

Replace /usr/bin/freevoboot with:

# Copyright 1999-2004 Gentoo Foundation
# Distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License v2

# use "freevoboot stop" to stop, "freevoboot xstop" if you use X.

freevo=`grep ^freevo= /etc/conf.d/freevo | cut -d'"' -f2`
webserver=`grep ^webserver= /etc/conf.d/freevo | cut -d'"' -f2`
recordserver=`grep ^recordserver= /etc/conf.d/freevo | cut -d'"' -f2`
encodingserver=`grep ^encodingserver= /etc/conf.d/freevo | cut -d'"' -f2`
commdetectserver=`grep ^commdetectserver= /etc/conf.d/freevo | cut -d'"' -f2`


if [ "x$1" != "xstop" ]; then
        if [ "$recordserver" == "yes" ]; then
                echo "Starting Freevo recordserver"
                /usr/bin/freevo recordserver start
        fi

        if [ "$commdetectserver" == "yes" ]; then
                echo "Starting Freevo commdetectserver"
                /usr/bin/freevo commdetectserver start
        fi

        if [ "$encodingserver" == "yes" ]; then
                echo "Starting Freevo encodingserver"
                /usr/bin/freevo encodingserver start
        fi

        if [ "$webserver" == "yes" ]; then
                echo "Starting Freevo webserver"
                /usr/bin/freevo webserver start
        fi

        if [ "$freevo" == "daemon" ] && [ "x$1" != "xstartx" ]; then
                echo "Starting Freevo daemon"
                /usr/bin/freevo daemon start
        elif [ "$freevo" == "yes" ] || [ "x$1" == "xstartx" ] ; then
                echo "Starting Freevo"
                if egrep -q '^display.*(x11|dga)' /etc/freevo/freevo.conf ; then
                        /usr/bin/freevo -fs &>/dev/null &
                else
                        /usr/bin/freevo start
                fi
        fi

else
        if [ "$freevo" == "daemon" ] && [ "x$1" != "xstopx" ]; then
                echo "Stopping Freevo daemon"
                /usr/bin/freevo daemon stop
        elif [ "$freevo" == "yes" ] || [ "x$1" == "xstopx" ] ; then
                echo "Stopping Freevo"
                /usr/bin/freevo stop
        fi

        if [ "$webserver" == "yes" ]; then
                echo "Stopping Freevo webserver"
                /usr/bin/freevo webserver stop
        fi

        if [ "$encodingserver" == "yes" ]; then
                echo "Stopping Freevo encodingserver"
                /usr/bin/freevo encodingserver stop
        fi

        if [ "$commdetectserver" == "yes" ]; then
                echo "Stopping Freevo commdetectserver"
                /usr/bin/freevo commdetectserver stop
        fi

        if [ "$recordserver" == "yes" ]; then
                echo "Stopping Freevo recordserver"
                /usr/bin/freevo recordserver stop
        fi
fi

To start freevo and the servers you have enabled in /etc/conf.d/freevo simply run

freevoboot