Pro Tip: Automatically Remove Commercials from EyeTV Recordings
If you’re one of the many Mac users who watch television on a Mac then you’re most likely using Elgato’s excellent application, EyeTV. In case you have no idea what EyeTV is all about then let me sum it up: this program turns your Mac into a virtual Tivo, allowing you to record, rewind, and pause live television! Another feature allows you to easily remove unwanted commercials, yet the process can be time consuming. I found an amazing script that can automate this process and keep those annoying commercials out of your recordings.
EyeTV Shortcomings
Lets get down to the basics. You flag your favorite TV show for recording, come home from work, sit down to watch it on your mac, and you see commercial after commercial. Annoying, right? Sure you could go through the video and manually edit out the commercials but at the same time view scenes from your show and probably the ending in doing so. Thats not a very good way of removing commercials.
The Fix
In comes Etv-Comskip, a Google code and port of Com-Skip. Somehow, I still haven’t figured it out, this back end application automagically marks commercials for deletion and with a few clicks EyeTV starts crunching away removing them from your video. How simple could it be? Simple as three steps:- Install Etv-Comskip
- Record a show
- Select the “Compact” dialogue in the bottom pane of your recording (see note)
This application can also check your previous recordings using a script included within the readme. It is a simple script so you can easily plug it into terminal to work it’s magic. I have already hand edited my previous videos so I can not say how well this script works.
Clicking the drop down menu button you will see that all of the commercials have been already selected for imminent deletion and I’m fore warning you, you may begin to smile. I have used this feature a few times and it has worked perfectly. You may want to double check that it hasn’t selected the end clip of your TV show, like the scenes for the next episode, for deletion. Besides that small bug the main show will be perfect.
Hand selecting commercials on shows over half an hour can become tedious but this nifty application seamlessly fixes that problem. I don’t know what I would do without this.
ETV-COMSKIP works on both Leopard as well as Tiger, you can choose your download here.
Footnotes
1 Always remember to double-check, as ‘compacting’ is irreversible.
—RP
Application Profile
- Application Name:
- ETV-COMSKIP
- Lead Developer:
- Jon Christopher
- Version:
- 1.0.3
- License:
- Freeware
- Type:
- Media Utility
- Competitor(s):
- Unknown
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