Skipping Commercials with Media Center

Posted By: Steven Kerr Lindsay | Dec 17th, 2007 @ 1:44 PM

You know a thing which bugged me for a long time with my Media Center is the fact that I had to watch commercials when I recorded shows.

Well... I didn't HAVE to watch them, but I still had to fast forward through them and I hated this. I went looking for a solution which would do it for me.

I looked at a lot of solutions and found most centered around actually cutting out the commercials after they had been recorded. Involving most of the time complex re-encoding of the shows.

In addition if the solution got it wrong, I had lost parts of my shows completely unless I kept the original recording around!

So I finally worked out I needed to find a solution which offered these things:

No re-encoding, this is too heavy duty per show for me. I don't want to actually re-encode video when I'm likely to delete it very shortly after watching it.
I want it to skip automatically for me through commercials.
I want the ability to NOT skip automatically through commercials.
I want to be able to turn off skipping commercials in the very obscure scenario that I actually want to watch the commercials (Super Bowl!)

Eventually I found something which does all of this (and a lot more) and I've been using it for a while now. I thought I'd share it with you guys as I imagine some people may benefit from it.

The application I'm using is called DVRMSToolbox.

A simple two minute install will get you up and working immediately. It works like this:

A windows service monitors your recordings, it uses another application (either ShowAnalyzer or ComSkip) which can work out when a commercial break starts and ends. The information on when the commercial break starts and ends is written to a file along side the actual recording of the show.

When you playback the recording this file is also being monitored,
when the service monitoring the playback see's that you are at a commercial break it tells Media Center to skip to the point that the commercial break ends.

To you the user, you simply see it skip instantly through all commericals in a show!

What is nice is the toolkit is really easy to setup, and you can be up and running in minutes and after it is setup it literally requires nothing, it just works.

While in Media Center, you can turn commerical skipping on and off while playing media by simply hitting down on your remote. You can also skip to the next or last segment of a program by hitting back and forward on the remote.

One thing I would recommend after installing DVRMSToolbox is registering ShowAnalzyer which is the default method used for detecting the commercial breaks. It is really accurate, but it costs about $20, which I think is very worth it.

However when you install DVRMSToolbox you will get a free 2 week trial of ShowAnalyzer, when the trial is over it will switch to another free piece of commercial break skip detection software called 'ComSkip' which doesn't work as well as ShowAnalyzer but does the job.

You can try both methods, for me I found ShowAnalyzer worked far better so I registered it.

You can grab DVRMSToolbox for both Windows Vista and Windows MCE 2005 here : http://babgvant.com/files/default.aspx

You can simple install instructions here : http://babgvant.com/Wiki/view.aspx/DVRMSToolbox/Install

Tags: Commercials, DVRMSToolbox, Media Center

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Comments (8)

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hamiltonguy

Brilliant! Your blog is going to become a regular stop for my mce research. The green button is an excellent resource but it is almost impossible to find a simple well-written entry that explains a problem, a solution, and how to implement it. Well done.

Galileu

Steven, any tips or tricks to installing it in Vista?

thanks!

EnglishBloke

In reply to Galileu

#Dec 17th, 2007 @ 6:51 AM

I use it on Vista, the only real difference you need to know is you need to ensure you have 'Commercial Skip Add-In' and 'Modify Folder Permissions' selected during installation.

The other thing I recommend is making sure you do a fresh installation if you intend to enter a registration code for ShowAnalyzer, as I found when I didn't do this, it would not easily change back to using ShowAnalyzer from ComSkip after registration has expired.

A thing to note is 'Commerical Skip Add-In' is not ComSkip, it includes the Media Center functionality for skipping, if you don't have it selected, it will not allow you to do the skipping inside Media Center.

Steve

BRISCOS HORSE

In reply to hamiltonguy

#Dec 16th, 2007 @ 11:58 AM

Here's another anti-commercial tool for media center http://www.lifextender.com/ works great! It does re-encode though..

Now, if someone can just show me how to share recorded tv between 2 Vista machines correctly, my life would be complete!

Kittyburgers

Unfortunately, I couldn't get this app to work on my VISTA x64 system. It *sort of* installed - without any error messages. However, I just couldn't find any settings, and wasn't aware of how to change the folder to be watched. Looking in the forums on the download page, I noticed that there did in fact seem to be an issue with VISTA x64. In the end, I uninstalled it - didn't seem like it was worth the effort. I like to know what's happening in the background, and I like to be able to control what is happening, but I didn't seem to have that control with DVRMSTolbox.

I like the idea, however, and maybe one day there'll actually be something a little more simple to install (with a proper installer for VISTA x64).

Kittyburgers

Thanks for the Lifextender tip. I had heard of this app before, but never checked it out. Worked right off the bat after I installed it. Looks like the best solution for me at this time. Looks good too; I can only hope that the author continues developing it further.

DaHoServer

Steve,

Great stuff... I have been evolving a system sorta like yours. I have three recording MC machines and a WHS. I just added a Linksys DMA-2100, which works great in the bedroom and after reading your write-up, have added the commercial skip add-in. I would go all extender, as you have, if I can figure out how to deal with the need for more than 2 tuners (with cable boxes) and therefore how to integrate two closet MC servers instead of the one you have.

My 'main' HTPC, in the front room, is a home built Vista Premium machine with a 3.6Gh P4 chip. I have used it for 3 years and it has worked great. Both tuners have MPEG2 hardware encoding and I have a AGP ATI X1600 Pro graphics card. The CPU usually would operate at 20-30% most of the time while watching and recording TV.

Since I installed the extender and commercial skip add-in, it has been ramping up the fan speed, and noise, multiple times a day - which is very irritating. The only time it would ever do that before is when it was running its nightly Norton scan. I checked and the CPU is running at full capacity with mostly the extender and commercial skip processes. The commercial skip is taking over 1/3 of the CPU. Does this make sense to you and is this just the way it is - new CPU time??

Thanks, in advance, for your whisdom.

EnglishBloke

Hey DahoServer

It could actually be right, ping me in an IM on here and we can take it offline to work out. Depending on the setup of the commerical skipping application it could be fully processing the video which could hit that high. It may be possible to reduce this.