Plex can now automatically remove commercials from your media

[William Gayde]

As cord cutting continues to grow, marketers will still need to make money. This results in more and more commercials being inserted into your content. Media server provider Plex has just added a new feature to their DVR aimed at removing these commercials entirely from the content you watch.

The new update was pushed out over the weekend but will still require you to manually enable it. The option is located under the settings menu and is called "Remove Commercials." There are some considerable issues with it though. Many users are reporting that it is very resource intensive, taking a long time to complete and causing very high CPU usage. For media servers running on older hardware, this many not be a viable option then.

The feature also permanently modifies the source file. This means that if the algorithm incorrectly classifies part of the actual show/movie as a commercial, it will be removed with no way of restoring it. This is only the case if the algorithm messes up, but given that it is brand new, this may be a potential issue for some. In order to access the new DVR feature, you will need a supported tuner or antenna and a Plex Pass subscription.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/72062-plex-can-now-automatically-remove-commercials-media.html

 

[Burty117]

Very cool, If I ever get a tuner card for my server, I'll give this a go, doubt it'll run very well on a 17watt Xeon CPU though if it's currently known for high CPU usage.

 

[Scodd]

Nice addition. I have been running Plex hard and heavy for a few months now. It does a great job for the most part. For anyone who really wants to get into it, I would suggest a newer quad core at the least, 16GB of RAM and lots of storage. You will use of space really quick since an hour of 1080 will run about 7GB. I was recording on one server with the tv-tuner card and saving it on another NAS server, trying to get everyone in the house to attach to the NAS server running Plex for viewing prerecorded stuff and only hitting the server with the tv tuner to watch live OTA stuff but that was nearly impossible to get them to do. Neither of the servers were powerful enough to do record 4 channels at once and stream stuff from the libray at the same time so I just ended up moving it all to i7-3930 with the quad tuner, switched some RAM around and a couple hard-drives and it's doing ok. I would suggest using a dedicated server. I have automated some of the menial tasks with handbrake and scripting to reduce certain recordings based on size, but it's not perfect so I am working on app to help automate stuff like that. Anyone else have time to work on developing such a application?