Tivo and New FCC Law on cable cards

[mattack]

Originally Posted by tneison

The main thing I miss from WMC is the commercial skip programs I used, I hate having to grab for the remote now to fast forward.

Maybe you were using FF generically, and it obviously ISN'T commercial skip, but type:

select play select 3 0 select

Now, the -> button is a 30 second skip button. So just wham on it a whole bunch of times, then possibly a couple 8 sec back skips.. and you've missed most of the commercials. (If you watch a lot of the same shows regularly, I think you will learn how long various commercial breaks are to vary # of 30 second skips.)

[tneison]

Originally Posted by mattack

Maybe you were using FF generically, and it obviously ISN'T commercial skip, but type:

select play select 3 0 select

Now, the -> button is a 30 second skip button. So just wham on it a whole bunch of times, then possibly a couple 8 sec back skips.. and you've missed most of the commercials. (If you watch a lot of the same shows regularly, I think you will learn how long various commercial breaks are to vary # of 30 second skips.)

Yeah - I meant I was using software to automatically strip out the commercials. So as it is recorded in WMC - once you set up a few different programs to run all of which were free - by the time you play the recorded content it literally skips ahead at each commercial automatically. No need to grab the remote at all. It worked 90% of the time. Just one of those things you get used to real quick. But I feel like a lazy p.o.s. complaining about having to 'reach' for a remote and press a button a few so I'll stop

[stcaudle12]

Good God! How many hours does it take to keep all this running when I can just plug in a Tivo? I build my own PC's and would never mess with this unless I suddenly found a time machine and had all the time in the world!

[mattack]

Originally Posted by tneison

Yeah - I meant I was using software to automatically strip out the commercials. So as it is recorded in WMC - once you set up a few different programs to run all of which were free - by the time you play the recorded content it literally skips ahead at each commercial automatically. No need to grab the remote at all. It worked 90% of the time. Just one of those things you get used to real quick. But I feel like a lazy p.o.s. complaining about having to 'reach' for a remote and press a button a few so I'll stop

90% of the time is an awfully BAD percentage.

I'd expect it to work very very close to 100% of the time. (or at least be 'optional' like the Replay commercial skip, which I never used, was)

Though, with enough work, you can get "commercial skip" with Tivo too -- download shows to a computer, run various open source tools to do commercial skipping, and then copy them back to the Tivo. If one has a machine already running all the time (server for other uses), it seems to me like it would be fun to play with (but not rely on).

[tneison]

Well, I was ok with the 90% because it was all freeware, 3 different packages all developed by different people, you configure to try to strip the commercials out. It wasn't like I was paying anyone for the service. Where it struggled was at the end of a show when it comes back from a commercial break for just one minute or less (so like the Daily Show 'moment of zen' piece that is 15 seconds) it would almost always skip right over that so you would have to rewind to catch it.

Once it was set up, even though it wasn't perfect it was a pretty good luxury to have. And in the case of WMC the standard fast forward functionality sucks because it is either too slow or too fast and didn't to the automatic 8 second re-wind Tivo does so well. So the commercial skip was key with WMC.

I'd image the Dish Network functionality on the Hopper works even better (for prime time network shows only of course).

[mr.unnatural]

Originally Posted by mattack

90% of the time is an awfully BAD percentage.

I'd expect it to work very very close to 100% of the time. (or at least be 'optional' like the Replay commercial skip, which I never used, was)

Though, with enough work, you can get "commercial skip" with Tivo too -- download shows to a computer, run various open source tools to do commercial skipping, and then copy them back to the Tivo. If one has a machine already running all the time (server for other uses), it seems to me like it would be fun to play with (but not rely on).

No commercial skip app works 100% of the time, which is why I configure mine to work manually. All I need to do is press the right arrow and it skips past the commercial to the beginning of the next program segment. If the commercial break isn't detected properly I just press the left arrow to get back to where I was and then FF to the next segment.

Commercial breaks are usually detected by the presence of blank frames between the commercial and the program segment. If there's no blank frame the app can't detect the break. You can easily see this using a frame-accurate editing program like VideoReDo. It's amazing how many programs are aired with no blank frames between the commercials and program material.

I may have to FF past a commercial only once or twice over a span of several recordings, so it's not that big of a deal. With the 30-second skip feature, if I don't have the remote in hand waiting to press the button at the exact moment the commercial begins I invariably end up skipping past the end of the commercial break and have to backtrack to the start of the program segment. With the commercial skip feature I can take my time picking up the remote because it skips to a specific bookmark and not a time interval.

The bottom line is that neither solution is perfect and both have their pros and cons. I prefer the commercial skip app because it's generally quite accurate and usually works with a single button press.