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ETVComskip

Commercial detection and skipping for EyeTV, using a Mac OS X port of 
comskip (http://www.kaashoek.com/comskip/).

These programs allow users of EyeTV to enjoy commercial-free recorded television

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Commercial skipping instructions:

1) run FileWatcher.  This process watches the EyeTV Archive directory for
   changes and processes new shows for commercials.  You may wish to make
   FileWatcher a login item.  When new recordings are finished,
   FileWatcher calls MarkCommercials.sh to scan the recording for
   commercials and create a commercial marker file (a .plist file in the
   recordings' directory with the same name as the .mpg file).
   NOTE: when run as a login item, debugging output goes to the system console.

2) Run ComSkipper.app.  This AppleScript will stay running, and wake up 
   periodically to see if EyeTV is playing a recording.  If it is, and the
   recording has a .plist (commercial list) file, the script will wake up
   more frequently to see if it needs to skip a commercial.
  
   When ComSkipper wakes up, it checks the current playback time.  If the
   playback time is within a commercial gap, ComSkipper tells EyeTV to jump
   to the end of the gap.


There are many options for tuning comskip, but they are beyond the scope
of this document.  For details, see http://www.kaashoek.com/comskip/, and
links therein.

Note: currently, the executable supplied for comskip is intel-only, as I
have no way to test a PPC version, and I'm not sure if additional changes
might be needed to comskip to support the PPC architecture.  The source to
comskip is provided (as required by the GPL) and I welcome reports of
success or failure on PPC machines.


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Batch scan of existing files:

You may wish to use FileWatcher to scan your entire EyeTV Archive
directory and mark commercials in all recordings.  This generally needs to
be done only once, since in normal operation FileWatcher will
automatically scan new shows for commercials.

To scan all files, you'll have to type the following in the Terminal:

/Applications/ETVComskip/FileWatcher.app/Contents/MacOS/FileWatcher all

This will probably take a long while, depending on how many recordings you have.

It is useful to run this command if you think FileWatcher has not been
running or has otherwise missed a recording.  If the .plist file exists,
commercial detection will not be run again, so this will be fast.
However, this *will* merge the markers from the .plist files into the
.eyetvr file so that they can be seen by EyeTV. This is *very* useful for
using EyeTV's compacting and exporting features.

Due to a limitation in EyeTV, external changes made to the .eyetvr file
made while EyeTV is running are overwritten by EyeTV, so you'll need to
quit EyeTV for these changes to be merged in properly.  The AppleScript
FileWatcher uses to find the EyeTV Archive directory will start EyeTV, so
FileWatcher will prompt you to press enter after you've quit EyeTV when
run in this mode.


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Keep only a certain number of episodes of a series:

A notable missing feature of the EyeTV software is the ability to limit
the number of recordings of a series to some set limit.  For instance, you
might want to limit recordings to the last two nights of the daily news,
or the last three episodes of some favorite cartoon for your kids.


EyeTVReaper.scpt is a script which will plug this gap.  EyeTVReaper is
called by FileWatcher, so there's no extra installation to do.  However,
you will have to tell the reaper what to do.  This is done by editing the
file /Applications/ETVComskip/PurgeList.txt.  In this file, lines starting
with # are ignored as comments, but all other lines should be of the
format:

days: pattern

where "days" is the number of days to keep, and "pattern" is a shell glob
pattern which matches the title of the series you want to purge.  If you
don't understand what this means, that's ok; the simplest explanation is
to just place a star (*) character before and after some word which is
unique among all the shows you record.  For instance, 

3: *Sesame*

would limit to three days of Sesame Street.

If more than one word is necessary to uniquely identify a series, place a
star * between each word.  For instance:

2: *NBC*News*
2: *CBS*News*

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Note: an earlier version of FileWatcher was an applescript designed to be run as
a folder action, but Folder Actions proved to be unreliable under Leopard.

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LICENSE: comskip itself is under the GPL, and as required by the GPL, the
sources are found in the src directory.  The AppleScripts are Copyright (c)
2007 by Jon A. Christopher, and are also placed under the GPL license.