Installation successful but...

Hi All,

Long time reader/follower, first time poster here. I know everybody's time is important so I will be try to be quick, thorough and detailed with my questions.

First up, I followed all the instructions that I can find to the letter when it comes to setting up SA with DirMon. I followed farmboy03's instructions that can be found on this thread:
http://forums.sage.tv/forums/showthread.php?t=14049

But before I did the instructions above, I made sure to follow Jere's instructions from this thread:
DirMon 0.2.3 not respecting "Ignore List" ??

I bought and registered SA, Jere even gave me my hand made key because for some reason, the system gave me a funky one when I regsitered. Anyway onto my questions. After setting up SA and DirMon, I noticed that:

• Nothing is happening. I get this message on DirMon's screen:
  
  Tue Jan 24 16:30:47 2006: Checking directories...
  Tue Jan 24 16:30:47 2006: Checking "C:\Documents and Settings\madmin\My Documents\My Videos"
  Tue Jan 24 16:30:47 2006: Checking "C:\Documents and Settings\madmin\My Documents\My Videos\SageTV"
  Tue Jan 24 16:30:47 2006: Checking "I:\My Recorded Shows"
  Tue Jan 24 16:30:47 2006: Checking "C:\MyVideos"
  Tue Jan 24 16:30:47 2006: Checking "C:\Documents and Settings\madmin\My Documents\My Videos\BeyondTV"
  Tue Jan 24 16:30:47 2006: Checking for orphan targets.
  Tue Jan 24 16:30:47 2006: Nothing to do... sleeping now...
  
  It seems that, SA isn't processing any of my recorded shows. In order for me to do a commercial detect, I'd have to go into SageTV Recordings > Select a Group/Recorded Show > Ctrl+O for Options > Select Commercial Detect All. Am I missing something?
• On ComSkip Playback Options (inside SageTV's Advanced section), I have Autoskip Commeciials Enabled and Pause playback before Skipping Enabled. What do these things actually do? The reason why I ask is, enabling these options aren't doing any automatic commercial detection. I just don't know half the stuff I am doing at this point so I apologize in advance.
• Is there anyway to do a proactive commercial skipping in SA? What I mean is, automatically mark and detect commercials while a show is recording? Not only that, go the extra mile with pausing the recording once a commercial is detected, then proceed on recording when the show resumes? Am I asking for the moon here? LOL! Sorry noobie questions here. If that doesn't exist anywhere, this'll be a good addition to SA's future releases.
• Am I screwing anything up at all because I think I may have installed ComSkip and SA on SageTV? But then again, the comskip.exe file I downloaded was the ComSkip Proxy file I got from the Dragon Global site. OMG, I am so confused. Would anyone be willing to put up with this?

All in all, I will appreciate any response. Thanks!

[Jere_Jones]

Can you post your dirmon.ini?

Jere

[Jere_Jones]

Originally Posted by Carlo DLS

On ComSkip Playback Options (inside SageTV's Advanced section), I have Autoskip Commeciials Enabled and Pause playback before Skipping Enabled. What do these things actually do? The reason why I ask is, enabling these options aren't doing any automatic commercial detection. I just don't know half the stuff I am doing at this point so I apologize in advance.

These options only affect how Sage will act when reading the .txt file. "Autoskip Commercial" will have Sage automatically jump over the commercial for you. Otherwise you can use the Custom4 and Custom5 commands to skip commercials. "Pause playback before skipping" will change behavior from just jumping past the commercial to pause, skip, play. That is something that will happen rapidly so you shouldn't even notice it, but if you are having wierd behavior at jumps (like the video freezing) then it can help. If you aren't seeing any wierd behavior, I would recommend leaving it disabled. (Anyone want to add to this?)

Originally Posted by Carlo DLS

Is there anyway to do a proactive commercial skipping in SA? What I mean is, automatically mark and detect commercials while a show is recording? Not only that, go the extra mile with pausing the recording once a commercial is detected, then proceed on recording when the show resumes? Am I asking for the moon here? LOL! Sorry noobie questions here. If that doesn't exist anywhere, this'll be a good addition to SA's future releases.

In a manner of speaking, this is already available. Just put a check mark in the "Process file even if it is being written to" block in DirMon so that DirMon won't wait until the recording is finished to kick off SA.
Since detecting commercials heavily depends on putting things in context, commercials aren't detected when the begin. Sometimes they aren't detected until well after they end. A common thing for people to do is wait until 15-20 minutes after the show has begun, then the commercials are (generally) already detected by the time they get to them.

Originally Posted by Carlo DLS

Am I screwing anything up at all because I think I may have installed ComSkip and SA on SageTV? But then again, the comskip.exe file I downloaded was the ComSkip Proxy file I got from the Dragon Global site. OMG, I am so confused. Would anyone be willing to put up with this?

Don't feel bad. Commercial detection is still in its infancy and as such can be very confusing.

If you put the comskip.exe that you downloaded from here in the SageTV directory, then that allows you to kick off a commercial detection run from inside of SageTV itself. Other than that, don't sweat it.

Jere

Thanks for the reply Jere.

I have a number of questions to ask but I think that, I should answer your first question before I start rambling on. Here is what's on my DirMon.ini file.

; DirMon initialization file
; Copyright (c) 2005
; Jeremiah M. Jones
; DO NOT EDIT MANUALLY
Version = 0.2
StartInTray = 1
Frequency = 600
WhileLive = 1
WhileRecording = 1
Directories = C:\\Documents and Settings\\madmin\\My Documents\\My Videos,C:\\Documents and Settings\\madmin\\My Documents\\My Videos\\SageTV,I:\\My Recorded Shows,C:\\MyVideos,C:\\Documents and Settings\\madmin\\My Documents\\My Videos\\BeyondTV
Recursive = 1
Source = mpg,mpeg
Target = txt,log,ccyes,ccno
[Processor 0]
Path = "C:\Program Files\Dragon Global\ShowAnalyzer\ShowAnalyzer.exe"
Hide = 1
DoesExistLogic = OR
BothLogic = AND
DoesNotExistLogic = AND

Anyway, it takes me a long time to reply to this because my HTPC is in a different location. So, am I doing anything wrong?

[Jere_Jones]

Originally Posted by Carlo DLS

So, am I doing anything wrong?

Take a look at the triggers block on the processor page and compare it to the screenshot from here. What you should see is that you haven't put in a trigger extension. Put that in and you should be good to go.

Jere

OMG, how something that simple can fix things. Seriously, if you looked at farmboy03's instructions, that link you just posted was on it, I apparently missed placing "txt" on that field. Now the only thing that isn't working out right is that my current SA settings are skipping commercials too early/starting the next segment a couple of seconds late. Don't worry I won't bug you for that because methinks I saw some good settings on one of the threads around here.

On a different note, I work as a systems analyst here in the Bay Area and one of the things I've been working on eversince I bought SageTV 4 and Beyond TV 4 (because I was high) is, compiling a list of good links and making a decent user doc out of it (yes I write design/user docs too). I would really like to create a decent user doc (containing field descriptions etc.) for integrating SA/DirMon with STV or BTV, so if you're looking for someone to help you with that, let me know and drop me a line (you should have my e-mail addy because I purchased SA, I think). It's all labor of love. I'll proceed with what I am doing and post it for other people out there to help them out because this is crazy, I feel like I went way over my head when I tried being know-it-all and went with and HTPC instead of TiVo.

I just wished that, BTV and STV has a simple interface that allowed you to copy to DVD/CD without leaving the application just like MCE. I'll be around scouring the boards for good settings, thanks!

________________________________
My HTPC Specs:
Gigabyte 800M 775 Micro ATX MoBo; P4 HT 2.6Ghz 775; 200GB HD EIDE; 1GB 400MHZ DDR; eVGA 6600LE 256MB; Hauppauge PVR500MCE; ATI HDTV All-in-Wonder; SB Audigy 2 ZS; inside an NMedia Micro ATX HTPC Black Case.

[Jere_Jones]

Originally Posted by Carlo DLS

I would really like to create a decent user doc (containing field descriptions etc.) for integrating SA/DirMon with STV or BTV,

Documentation would be greatly helpful!!!! If I can explain anything, just send me an email to showanalyzer@gmail.com and I'll give it my best shot.

Originally Posted by Carlo DLS

I just wished that, BTV and STV has a simple interface that allowed you to copy to DVD/CD without leaving the application just like MCE. I'll be around scouring the boards for good settings, thanks!

Take a look at the KJake DVD burning stv on the SageTV forum. It's in development but maybe some kind words might help.

Jere