Commercial Skip for Media Center Vista RC2
posted on Tuesday, November 14, 2006 by bobby @ 5:58 pm
0 comments
I found a killer add-in for Media Center running on Vista RC2. Here's the jist:

Written in C#, it runs a few utilities against your DVR-MS files, scouring the video for commercials using a few techniques. The recognized commercial time slots are logged in an XML file and associated w/ the DVR-MS file. When playing the DVR-MS file in Media Center, the commercials are automatically removed - and quite seamlessly in most instances.

This add-in (which is part of a toolbox called DVRMSToolbox - it contains all the little apps needed to make everything work) allows you to watch your shows either with or without commercials. This is nice in case you want to go back and watch the new Geico caveman commercial 10 times. And, no extra video files are ever created - just the small XML data file.

You can set it up so new video files are automatically discovered (using a FileSystemWatcher service) and parsed for commercials. This does take a fair amount of CPU (80%+) but the thread is running at Below Normal priority so as not to slow you down.

It's only been about 2 days with this new setup so we'll see how it goes, but so far... me likey. Very nice not to have to use the fast forward/rewind or the 30 sec skip anymore. Too bad Media Center didn't have this capability natively.

Click here to visit the DVRMSToolbox FAQ page

Click here to visit the DVRMSToolbox web site
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People call me Bobby DeRosa
I live somewhere in San Diego, CA
MCSD, MCAD, MCP

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