[Rich A]

I've been at the commercial cutting thing for a few years now. Mostly I work in the Mpeg format. (Using Womble)

Today it is more difficult than ever to automatically find start and stop points when dealing with commerical TV. In order to squeeze every last second of available time for commercial content the networks are cutting them very close. In fact there are some stations that have "no" black or fade to black at all.

IE. Frame number 1999 is the movie and the very next frame (# 2000) is the commercial. Even worse, I have a local station that actually does a "fade/merge" into the movie from a commercial. There is actually a few frames with over-lapping video from both the movie and the commercial. That one really frosts me.

I own a few of those ReplayTV boxes and one of them is the model that had commercial skip. It surprised me how well it works, but it always gets a few frames you don't want, one way or the other and does miss some entirely. Still it's about 90 percent on the good side. Good luck. A WM format frame accurate editor with auto commercial processing would be well received I'm sure.