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I’m slowly collecting episodes of South Park as they rerun on a variety of channels late at night. Beyond TV perfectly records each show and then Mediaportal’s outstanding “TV Series” plugin organizes them by series. The problem is that these shows have commercials and Mediaportal doesn’t have a “skip commercial” feature like BTV. Of course, I like MP’s organizational system so I wanted to find a way to get rid of those commercials.

Edit Manually

Of course, there are several options for manually cutting out commercials. I used the program StaxRip to remove commercials for a whole season of The Office. This is a tolerable (although not optimal) solution for a weekly show, but South Park is on three times a night, five nights a week in my neighborhood. I am not going to hand edit 15 shows a week.

cBreak

A little freeware program named cBreak came to my rescue. It has no GUI and the drag-and-drop batch file included by the author never worked for me. However, after going in and hand-editing the batch file, I was able to do a couple test runs. With the default settings, cBreak seemed to work almost perfectly! The only issue I’ve had is with the 10-second tag at the end of The Office episodes. cBreak thinks these are commercials. Naturally, you can edit the settings or even manually approve deletions to deal with these issues.

Automation

I was pleased with the solution and now just wanted a way to automate it. I wrote a little batch file to call cBreak and run it on avi files in a directory. Using advice from Lifehacker, I set up a scheduled task to run my cBreak batch file once a week and clean up my South Park collection for me. Now I just have to remove those annoying Comedy Central logos!

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2 Responses to “Automatically Cut Commercials using CBreak”

  1. Ron Withers | March 13th, 2008 at 7:26 pm | link

    Would you care to share some exmaples of your batch file to read a directory of your files and convert them. I have everything else working and am familiar with windows scheduled tasks but I am running into a road block trying to automate this. Any help or examples you could provide would be greatly appreciated.

    Thanks
    Ron

  2. Odin | May 19th, 2008 at 11:53 pm | link

    I would also appreciate an example of the said batch file. I would also like to know if you’ve had any issues running the program on manual with dvix (in the avi header of course)
    Thanks for your time.

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