How do I use comskip

[martincjose]

I have Jellyfin 10.10.7 installed on Windows10 and it's connected to my HDHomeRun Extend.  Everything is working great and I am able to schedule and record shows.  Now I have started playing with comskip so I can skip ad's .  I want to skip (either skip or ask to skip) and I don't want to reencode and remove ads (not yet anyway).  I setup comskip and setup the DVR section with the path to comskip.  I set a test test recording and I can see the EDL file (with the ad times) in the recording folder.  Now I want to have the player (web, Jellyfin Media Player on Win10 or Firestick) skip the ad but it's not skipping anything.  On the player I click on the user icon, Playback, and set Commercial Segments to Skip/Ask To Skip but nothing is skipped or asked to skip when I play the recording.  What am I doing wrong?  Thanks

[martincjose]

For example, following is the EDL file that comskip created for an episode of The Jeffersons:

72.87 268.10 0
1635.57 1798.56 0

But nothing is happening at those times when I watch the recording.

[HokieRulz]

Jellyfin doesn't read EDL files directly. I admit I haven't looked at this for a while, but the essence is that you need to use comchap to mark commercials as chapters, and then use ffpmeg to convert the initial video. There are a couple scripts on github to do this, though they haven't been updated recently.

Others may be able to chip on on what they are using.

[martincjose]

Thank you for the confirmation. That's what I figured since I couldn't get it working. My question is, if Jellyfin doesn't support EDL files, what is the point of having "Commercial Segments" -> None/Ask To Skip/Skip under the Users Playback section?

Thanks

[HokieRulz]

Overall from what I can tell this is still a work in progress with Jellyfin.  I'll do my best, and if anyone has better info please chime in.

The "old" way to commercial skip in Jellyfin was to create chapters in your media file using your favorite tools (comskip, comchap, ffpmeg.)  Then when you get to a commercial the beginning and end of the commercial would be marked as a chapter, and in the client you would click on the "next chapter" button to skip the commercial.

Now there is a new(ish) feature that is not yet fully implemented called "Media Segments" (read here).  The commercial skip fields you are seeing are part of this.  There is also the official Chapter Segments Provider plugin you can install that will create media segments from chapters IF you have your chapter named correctly - which mine aren't currently so I just use the "jump to next chapter button."

It seems to me that what would be nice to have is a script/plugin that will read the comskip EDL files and directly write the media segments to the Jellyfin metadata.  That way the entire original video/audio file doesn't have to be rewritten to include the chapters.  Has anyone already done this?  If so, I'd really like to have it!  If not, Jellyfin is open source, so if not I might have to take a shot at it.

[HokieRulz]

Google is my friend!  rrhett has already written this plugin and it is available on github.  The first version was released two months ago, and there are a few issues logged, but it is exactly what we are talking about in this thread.  Right now you would need to run comskip first outside of this plugin to produce the EDL - a postprocessing script most likely. I'll be testing soon!

[martincjose]

Let me know if you get this to work and what you did. Thanks

[HokieRulz]

It turns out that plugin was written for Jellyfin v10.10.6/.NET 8.0 and wouldn't run for Jellyfin 10.11.x. I'm not a C#/.NET guy but I forked the repository, muddled through, and have it working locally for my Jellyfin instance. I want to review what I did before I update my changes to github, which I hope to do early next week so that others can try it and provide feedback.

Jellyfin media segments expect the Comskip EDL file to have a "3" for the segment type to indicate a commercial, but Comskip was defaulting to a 0 for the segment type. You can either manually update your EDL files, or put the line "edl_skip_field=3" (no quotes) in your comskip.ini file and rerun Comskip. The EDL files should be in the same directory as the media files, and have the same name as the media file but with an .edl extension. This SHOULD be the default for comskip (e.g. If the media file is "Some Media File.ts" then the EDL file should be "Some Media File.edl".)