[mythtv-users] Re: commercial skip/flagging - how well does it work for you?

[Duncan Sargeant]

Dane Kantner wrote on Sun August 10, at 22:26 -0500:
> I was playing around with the commercial flagging settings, and began to
> wonder what others' experience of it is...  Until tonight, I had it enabled
> to flag them, but not auto skip... I turned on auto skip to be experimental
> and see how well it works.
> 
> frequently enough on other shows to be of concern.  Is there a setting I
> should look into?

I've got a related problem and an idea for a solution.  My problem is
that the commercial flagging is incredibly unreliable, so I flag, but
do the skipping manually with Z and Q.  My problem is that if the
flagging hasn't worked, it skips way ahead, and I have to navigate back
manually (if Q doesn't take me back to where I was).  I wonder whether
it would be sensible to have an upper limit for skip - say about 300
seconds (commercials don't usually last longer than that).

Another idea I've been thinking about is writing commercial flagging
based on the channel logo appearing - about 5 seconds after
commercials, we always get a subtitle showing the name of the show
along with the channel logo.  In theory it should be a lot more
reliable than blank screen detection.  However, it would be difficult to
configure, requiring a picture of the logo to look for, for each
channel.

,dunc