Automatic Commercial Skip?

Can you try another playback device such as a smartphone or tablet?

For example the iPhone app says “Commercial skip: Ready”, see screenshot below.

From the Tablo Support pages:

Is Automatic Commercial Skip coming to the Tablo app for Samsung or LG Smart TVs?
At this time, the player software on Samsung and LG Smart TVs is incompatible with the Automatic Commercial Skip feature. We will re-evaluate the possibility of adding this feature to these platforms in the future.

So, it appears that the reason you aren’t able to use Commercial Skip is because LG app for Tablo doesn’t support it yet.

1 Like

Another Tablo Support page, aptly named Error Messages -Automatic Commercial Skip Error Messages – Tablo says:

The the iOS & Android mobile and web apps are compatible with the feature but will NOT show success/failure messages.

While there’s a screen shot of iOS with the message. The web app will -Optimized for Chrome - why no "Commercial Skip: Ready" - depending which browser you use. It’s difficult to pin down exactly for sure what’s going on. Pages get re-written left with original dates making it a challenge to follow any changes.

Many pages claim there’s performance improvements while a few users state support suggest they try using one for a “fix”.

Thank you.

Overall, commercial skip works and is one of the best features in my opinion. We actually miss it when viewing shows on other apps/devices. Sure, on occasion it’s a little off, or doesn’t work due to a crappy signal, but for the most part, works well. It is interesting that for certain shows, like Judge Judy, the last or second to last commercial break doesn’t recognize when the show comes back on and skips over like 10 mins of show… every single time. Curious how the skip works and why it would consistently miss that return all the time.

Repeatable issues like this are super helpful for us to know. I’ll make sure to pass this along to the team so they can perhaps adjust the algorithm or create a custom ‘recipe’ for this show.

Anyone else seeing this on Judge Judy?

In SurLaTablo’s commercial cutting algorithm, I called this “the postscript”. As SurLaTablo does merely black frame detection, the problem with postscripts is that there is little difference block wise between a run of commercials and a postscript. If both runs are of similar size, the question is… which is real, which is commercial?

So, in SurLaTablo, the postscript features basically disables commercial handling at the end of a show… yes, you will get that last set of commercials, but you’ll also get to see who won final Jeopardy.

Commercial detection is hard. Even harder if you’re only doing black frame detection (like SurLaTablo).

So, Tablo (OG style), all recordings are broken into a series of mpeg4-ts elements. That defines the granularity at which things work on the Tablo. Now, beyond this, I’m not sure what they do… but for them it would be figuring out which ts segments belong and which don’t. That could be a harder algorithm than what SurLaTablo does, because I slap all the ts file together before attempting detection.

For Tablo’s commercial detection, they are (I believe), creating a mechanism to skip from one element of the playlist to something down the road in the playlist (skipping the commercial ts files). Just not sure how they can look at a ts file and determine if it’s a commercial. They may be doing “something” with some ts concatenations and analysis to better determine this.

Regardless, whatever their algorithm is, I believe they are having some of the same problems I saw when dealing with those short postscripts at the end of shows.

With that said, Tablo’s commercial detection is actually pretty good. I’ve compared theirs to SurLaTablo, and while SLT did win in some cases, there were plenty of others where Tablo’s solution was better.

I believe SLT does better in the case of Judge Judy (for example). But it’s a post process extraction piece of software. It leaves you with an extracted recording with commericals removed (not skipped). And if it makes a mistake, you might not be terribly happy.

I did share my idea that SLT might do better with some kind of “chapter” insertion and the ease to skip chapters… but it’s beyond something integrated into most players. And with that said, it might be possible to create a “playlist” approach… but pretty radical. But definitely something that fits for Tablo to do.

1 Like

This topic was automatically closed 365 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.