Automatic commercial skipping is a go for Media Center in Windows 7
By Ben Drawbaugh 
posted Feb 9th 2009 6:55PM
posted Feb 9th 2009 6:55PM
posted Feb 9th 2009 6:55PM
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One of my upgrade roadblocks from Vista to Windows 7 is out of the way. Hopefully Lifextender will get updated. The last update was March 2008.
I was looking in the DTB forums not too long ago and did see a thread that looked promising for Windows 7 support. If I remember correctly it wasnt full .wtv support has that changed?
come on lifextender update....
Yes, where the hell is that?
Especially now, it needs an update.
Oh, Hell yes!
Looks like my media center PC will be getting Windows 7.
Damn, I hope we get some wtv support soon. I have a piles of recordings waiting to be cleaned.
Too bad none of this works with CableCard PCs ;-(
How is this going to work? Since dvrms toolbox isn't actually doing the show analyzing, but instead using comskip, which doesn't support .wtv containers, how will the commercial map file be generated? On the comskip forums, they state that .wtv support is not in the works right now because they are focusing on .h264 instead. I thought essentially DVRMSToolbox was using the files generated by Comskip, then interfacing with VMC to do the actual skip. So if there isn't a commerical map, how can dvrmstoolbox know when to skip?
Looks like I found the answer to my own question. On the dvmsToolbox forums, they basically say you will need to convert the .wtv file to a dvrms file (using ToDvrms) and then comskip will work. Kind of sloppy, but better than nothing.
MPEG may be a more reliable choice, but you need to do a little more work to get it setup.
Ok, Now please fix WEBGUIDE. Please?
skipping commercial tech is kind of useless these days due to how they screw with the length of commercials.
This isn't based on length, there is software that can actually tell when the commercial starts and stops.
Nice to see Windows 7 Media Center is catching up to where the competition (including VMC) was five-plus years ago ;)
Talk about being a hater, 7 isn't even out yet and you expect it to be done. ;)
I couldn't resist Ben. Seriously though, I'm glad to see commercial skipping making it to W7MC. If I ever have to switch to it for my HTPC that is a must-have for our house.
In my testing with Win7, the bug that prevented commercial skipping (not supporting the proper MSAS functionality) was not quite fixed. I still got the same error seen in TV Pack a high percentage of the time. I let MS know about it on the GreenButton, I hope it will be addressed before the release. But just as importantly, we have to hope that MS will document the wtv container so that comskip and SA can provide native support. Otherwise it is really kludgy to get commercial skip files generated and (near) real-time processing is impossible.