Skipping Commercials

[KBeebe]

Hi all,

I've been using Beyond TV for a few months now and I absolutely love it! I've seen several references to "skipping commercials" on recorded shows in the product descriptions on this and other websites. At the moment, the only way I know to skip commercials is to fast forward thru them until the show comes on again. I usually end up going too far and have to reverse a bit to get back to where the last commercial ends.

Is there a way to automatically skip commercials so I can have Beyond TV determine where the show continues? I haven't seen anything in the documentation regarding this. It's kind of a pain to fast forward, reverse, fast forward again and so on to get past the commercials on recorded shows.

Thanks!

Kevin Beebe

[gsinpei]

Yes you can use smartskip which when enabled will cause BTV to scan the show and mark where the commercials are allowing you to skip over them with a press of a button.
It does use quite a lot of processing power though and that's why I don't use it. I don't fast forward but skip forward a minute at a time and back 10 seconds at a time which is very quick and easy without using smartskip and it's extra cpu processing.

[switchflare]

I too am a new BTV user. I was really hoping I could get my Firefly remote to skip through exactly to the end of the commercials with one click. I was surprised how long it took to generate the Smartskip on hour-long HDTV shows, even with my E6400 and 2 GB RAM. I'm impressed with its accuracy, but as OP said...kind of a pain to skip through and then go back, even when the end of the commercials are marked.

[Talk4Cheap]

If smartskip has run, the blocks of commercials will be highlighted on the bar. Hit the "Channel Up" button of the remote and it will skip the entire block of commercials and start playing where the commercials ended. I love this feature

[switchflare]

I guess I should have just kept pressing buttons until I saw something happened. I wouldn't have guessing the Channel button though...maybe it was in some instructions that I never read...only messed with it for a few minutes. Thanks for the tip.

[mits]

I too use to use the skip button on the remote to skip over the marked commercials, until just the other day when I found out about using the up arrow or channel up remote buttons take right to the beginning of your show again. It works great! Enjoy the newly learned feature.

Now if we could only get Burn to DVD to have an option to automatically remove them before burning to disc. Even having a simple built-in manual option to select the marked areas to cut before burning would be nice. Having to launch a seperate application to read in the xml file to do this is less than optimal.

[psionic]

Originally Posted by mits

I too use to use the skip button on the remote to skip over the marked commercials, until just the other day when I found out about using the up arrow or channel up remote buttons take right to the beginning of your show again. It works great! Enjoy the newly learned feature.

Now if we could only get Burn to DVD to have an option to automatically remove them before burning to disc. Even having a simple built-in manual option to select the marked areas to cut before burning would be nice. Having to launch a seperate application to read in the xml file to do this is less than optimal.

Seek and ye shall find :: AutoXvid -- just turn off the Xvid encoding and you have a nicely automated commercial cutting solution.

[Jakesty]

You'd probably be better off trying CMCquisition's configuration. So many shows are not picked up properly by BTV's commercial skip. CMCquisition has a configuration set up so that you can specify what shows to cut since they're not always perfect. It too uses XVID which is real nice.
Check his signature for the link to details on how to set up. It's fairly involved but mostly straightforward like any post processing job. The best part is that you can specify which channels to cut and others just to perform the commercial skip process but leave alone.