Comment Feed for Skipping Commercials with Media Center (EnglishBloke on Channel 10)

Re: Skipping Commercials with Media Center

EnglishBloke — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 04:57:24 GMT

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.

Re: Skipping Commercials with Media Center

DaHoServer — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 17:24:58 GMT

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.

Re: Skipping Commercials with Media Center

Kittyburgers — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 06:01:21 GMT

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.

Re: Skipping Commercials with Media Center

Kittyburgers — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 02:00:39 GMT

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).

Re:

BRISCOS HORSE — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 23:32:40 GMT

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!

Re:

EnglishBloke — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 19:11:51 GMT

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

Re: Hey I have a Media Center why do I need to watch commercial breaks!?

Galileu — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 11:51:13 GMT

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

thanks!

Re: Hey I have a Media Center why do I need to watch commercial breaks!?

hamiltonguy — Sun, 16 Dec 2007 16:58:50 GMT

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.