[mythtv-users] Commercial Blocker?

[Bruce Markey]

Mike Diehl (Encrypted email preferred) wrote:
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> On Thursday 29 April 2004 03:07 pm, Chris Petersen wrote:
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>>>So you are telling me that the commercial blocker is THAT good?  I've
>>>just started building my MythTV box and am very intrigued about the
>>>commercial blocker.

"Commercial blocker" is okay but "commercial skipping" is a
better description. The whole show is recorded as is. Nothing
is cut out so you can't miss anything even if the commercial
detection is problematic. It marks where it believe the beginnings
and endings of commercial breaks are. When a commercial starts
you can press a button to skip to the end and the time skipped
is shown so that you can verify that it skipped over 3:00 minutes
and not like 17:00. If it works well for you, you can turn on the
automatic skipping but if a show has a problem you can turn it
off right from the on screen display.

The way it works is that the screen goes black before and after
commercials. If there are three nearly black frames in a row (1/10
second) that may be a commercial. There are rarely blank spots
during show, however, they can happen but won't happen a 30 or 60
second intervals. If there are a series of blackouts at even length
intervals for a period of time then it is almost certainly a
commercial break.


> Wow!  I can't wait to get my box running.  That could reduce the amount of 
> "time" I spend watching TV.  I wonder how effectively it could be used on the 
> evening news to filter out the weather and sports segments....

If you skip "previously on...", that same old introduction, "Coming
up next..." and commercials, most hour long shows take about 40min
to watch. Now, things like evening news is where DVRs are a big win.
I record Newsnight with Arron Brown each night. I watch the opening
headlines and the convenient timetable for the stories then fast
forward to the things I want to see but watch for things that catch
my eye along the way. I normally spend less than 10 min on an hour
of news. Ironically, I spend about 20min on the Daily Show's fake
news ;-).

I watch Survivor (40min any time after 8:20 Thursday evenings =). The
CBS' Early Show then has the loser Friday morning so I set a weekslot
record for The Early Show on Fridays, fast forward to the 4min
survivor interview then delete it.

So, yes, it does make watching TV more efficient. You can record
lots of things just because you want to see parts of things. Last
night I had four tuners busy recording an NHL playoff game, NBA
playoff game, a favorite baseball team and the American Idol result
show. I watched each game in an average of less than an hour and
saw all three games, Idol and the evening news in less time than
it would take to watch one game in real time without a DVR.

--  bjm