Ad removal

Free-to-air recordings come with their ad breaks. Fetcharr can find those breaks, and optionally cut them out, using comskip (an ad-detection tool) and ffmpeg, both bundled in the image. It's off by default, and built on the assumption that detection is sometimes wrong.

WARNING

How accurate detection is varies channel by channel on Australian free-to-air. Run DETECT mode first and check the breaks it reports before you let it CUT.

Turn it on

Two things have to be on: the master switch in Settings → AD REMOVAL (off by default), and a per-show mode on the Shows tab.

Modes

• DETECT notes where the breaks are and saves that against the recording, without touching the file. Use it to check how accurate comskip is on your channels.
• CUT removes the breaks by copying the video across untouched (no re-encoding; the output stays .ts) and keeps the original as <file>.ts.orig.

Backups and retention

Every cut keeps a .ts.orig backup for a window you choose (ad_original_retention_days, default 7), then routine cleanup removes it. If a cut goes wrong, rename the .orig back over it to recover the original.

The comskip.ini

Fetcharr ships a comskip.ini tuned for AU free-to-air. Drop your own comskip.ini into the /config bind mount to override it; Settings shows which one is active.

Cost and gating

Scans are CPU-bound: budget roughly 30 minutes per 75-minute recording on NAS-class hardware. The scan is niced so it doesn't starve concurrent downloads. For a CUT-mode show, delete-from-Fetch is only queued once the cut verifies, so the box keeps the pristine copy if a cut fails.

Cuts snap to keyframes, so a second or two either side of a break is expected. The full pipeline (verify-then-swap, keep-segment maths, crash recovery) is in the deep dive.