I'll take a look at it and see if I can apply it to my situation. Thanks!

You could try executing the query manually to see if it gives a useful error message.

I had to change the MySQL queries a bit to get it to function. It ran and completed successfully...but the file size is actually a bit bigger!!! Are they dependancies that I could be missing? It's 1 meg bigger.

Thanks again.

There are no dependencies. I'm amazed that it could make a bigger file since all it does is copy sections from one file to another. Does the resultant file play ok? Are the cut sections removed?

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1167177664 Aug 17 09:52 1043_20050814090000_20050814093000.nuv.tmp
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1166079936 Aug 14 18:00 1043_20050814173000_20050814180000.nuv

those are the two files. tmp being the one with commercials cut. The resultant file does indeed play fine..and the commercials are still there. I'll post what I got when I ran the program in a few minutes.

Here's the end of the log. Is it supposed to end with this message?

Yes.
You did enter a cutlist didn't you? You do know that commercial cut does not actually detect commercials, but just uses the myth entered cutlist dont you?

I did not *load* a cutlist, but mythtv is doing a commercial detection job after each show. Do I have to load one into commercial_cut? Doesn't it detect it by itself?

I have not explored commercial detecton fully, so I dont know everything that is possible. Having said that, when myth does a commercial detection, I dont think it stores the commercial detection points as cut points, but stores them separately somehow.

From http://mythtv.org/docs/mythtv-HOWTO-11.html

In edit mode
Left/Right : move forward and backward
Up/Down: alter the amount of time you jump forward and backward. Increments are: nearest cutpoint, nearest video keyframe, 1 frame, 0.5 seconds, 1 second, 20 seconds, 1 minute, 5 minutes, and 10 minutes.
PageUp/PageDown move forward and backward to the nearest cut point
< or > move forward or backward by 10 times the normal jump amount
Space/Enter: allows you to set or delete a cut point
Z : loads the commercial skip list (if one exists) into the cutlist
C or Q: clear all cut points in the cutlist
I: Inverts the cutlist

So you need to go into edit mode and then press Z to load the commercial detection points as a cutlist. Also note that commercial detection is not always 100% accurate.

I guess it would be possible to get commercial_cut to use the commercial detection points instead of the cutlist, but given that the detection is not always acurate, this would be somewhat dangerous. You should probably check the commercial detection before cutting.

What I do is after the mythcommflag has run, I call it again

mythcommflag --chanid xxx --starttime yyyyyy --gencutlist

this automatically loads the cutlist into the database without manual intervention. Then I run commercial_cut on it.

So my modified mythcommflag script looks like

mythcommflag.orig --all the params being passed
mythcommflag.orig --chanid xx --starttime yyyyyyyyy --gencutlist
commercial_cut.modified -c xxxx -s xxxx

Thanks, I'll try that.

Mike

I'll post my mythcommflag script if you want.

Yes, please.

you have a PM

If the script isnt too long, you should post it in this thread so that others can benefit too.