[mythtv-users] Cheap HD media players

[Greg Oliver]

On Fri, Jan 15, 2010 at 8:13 AM, Brian Wood <beww at beww.org> wrote:
> On Friday 15 January 2010 03:07:55 am Mark Wormgoor wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> > > I'm using the WD TV Live with no problems. Haven't figured out a good
>> > > way to skip commercials, but it's great for the kids and their shows on
>> > > PBS.
>> >
>> > Are you guys using these things as UPnP renderers, or connecting in some
>> > other way? (Samba share?)?
>> >
>> > Unless you can run a full frontend I don't see any way to get commercial
>> > skip.
>>
>> The Xtreamer that I use (and probably other media players out there)
>> have Myth's capability to skip forward 3 mins / 30 seconds, or skip
>> backward 1 min / 10 secs. This doesn't automatically skip commercials
>> (which I never had enabled on Myth either as it sometimes got it wrong
>> and just skipped over some of the recording), but it means you can
>> skip a commercial block in a couple of secs, which is good enough for
>> me. My previous player (Buffalo Linktheater) only had fast-forward,
>> which made skipping commercials a nightmare.
>>
>> One way to automatically skip commercials on these devices is to have
>> myth do commercial detection and then transcoding to cut it from the
>> recordings, but you risk loosing parts of your recording.
>
> So how are you connecting to the backend? UPnP? Samba? NFS?
>
> I find commercial detection to be essentially perfect, on some networks. It
> seems to be the ones that regularly show their logo, and/or the ratings logo,
> upon return from a commercial break. On some networks, the History Channel is
> an example, I can trust the detection enough to just trust the automatically
> generated cut list, on others I have to watch and adjust the cut points
> manually, which can be tedious. Others, BBC America being an example, are less
> then 50% reliable with commercial detection.
>
> I can accept errors that simply show me all or part of a break, but when
> actual programming is skipped it's unacceptable. BBCA seems particularly prone
> to the "bad" type of error, I usually disable commercial skip and just do it
> manually with BBCA.
>
> The prices of media players and devices capable of running a full frontend are
> converging, and might soon meet.
>
> The benefits of a full frontend are enough to justify the cost of a Revo, at
> least for me. It's HD-capable, very low power and looks OK for the benefit of
> people who care about such things.
>
> I have a D-Link DSM-520, but I really miss the commercial skip capability.
> There is a huge difference between "being able" to skip through a commercial
> block manually and sitting back and letting Myth just tell me how much of my
> life I have just recovered.
>
> The variable playback rate is also a very nice feature, especially for
> "talking heads" type programming.
>

With the "networks" seemingly all throwing the ratings up for every
show preview, it basically kills commercial detection anyway..  I find
myself getting confused even while fast forwarding through commercial
when I see the NC-17 box show up only to realize it was for a damn
series preview...

They are not idiots..  Hard to compensate for that..

I have opted toi just turn off commercial detection all-together..

-Greg