Commercial Skip status:

I hope this is the right place to ask this question. My apologies if it isn’t.

I have a number of recorded shows that Commercial Skip was not successful on. Using Tablo Tools, the Commercial Skip status is shown as “Commercial Skip status: error (internal)

I believe I have read on the forum that if Commercial Skip fails right after the show, it is retried at the next Nightly Maintenance and again at the Nightly Maintenance after that. If it fails then, it doesn’t try again. My question is, is “error (internal)” a temporary failure that will be tried again or is that terminal?

It’s interesting that the same show seems to ALWAYS give this error while other shows recorded before and after show Commercial Skip status as READY.

What does the Commercial Skip status show when viewing the recorded show using one of the devices that support Commercial Skip, that is nVidia Shield, Roku, Fire TV, Apple TV, etc? If it shows a reason why Commercial Skip has failed, then it has been processed and no additional tries will happen. If there is no Commercial Skip status shown, then it is possible that another attempt may still occur.

On an Amazon Firestick is simply says, “Commercial Skip detection failed”. The Web App on Windows 10 says nothing. The Android App also says nothing.

That’s why I looked at it with Tablo Tools. That’s the only place I have seen a reason listed.

I can confirm it is terminal. No additional attempts will be made. I see this on many shows on certain sub-channels.

Interesting. Sounds like those shows should be “filtered” so it doesn’t even try.

Thanks!

Steve

As a follow-up… Today, episodes of the same program from the same channel show Commercial Skip status as “READY”. I was thinking that ALL episodes of that program would fail Commercial Skip for some reason but that’s apparently not the case. Yesterday all episodes failed but today they seem fine. Murphy is alive and well!

I also see a mix of success and failures on the same program. In my case I think the quality of the feed coming from the broadcaster is suspect. The reception is fine but the data stream the broadcaster is transmitting contains random errors. It is a well known problem in my area (Minneapolis) and the broadcaster has made some improvements but the issues are not fully resolved.

Thanks for that. While Tablo Tools (very valuable program) reports the recording as “clean” I too suspect it’s in the station feed. I have some channels that almost ALWAYS succeed in Commercial Skip while others, like Quest often have issues. Thanks for your comments!

Our mobile & web apps are able to automatically skip commercials but don’t yet have commercial skip status details.

You can read more about the success/failure messages here:

Thanks for that. What I was observing was perhaps a better question for Tablo Tools people but I didn’t know how to ask it there… While the Firestick App says “Commercial Skip detection failed”, the definition of that is “Other Failure” in your referenced article. Tablo Tools defines it as “ERROR (Internal)”. I was curious if that meant it would be retried or if the failure was fatal and, based on replies here, I guess there will not be a retry. The term “internal” was curious to me. I didn’t know if that meant the programming in the Tablo itself caused the failure (since it said ERROR) or if it was related to signal, Commercial Skip server issue or what.

Thanks for the reply and the reference to the official definitions.

Also, noted somewhere, long commercials - like a couple minutes, cause issues and can be passed over.

As the question in the Tablo-Tools post, or open an issue on github It’s most likely he’s not defining anything, just passing on the raw data from tablo for the episode recording from:

http://tabloIP:8885/recordings/series/episodes/XXXXXX

Where XXXXXX is the objectID of the episode. I get some that say recording is “dirty”… as reported by tablo’s data, but shows ok in tablo’s apps.