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Automatic commercial skipping comes to Windows 7

by Ben Drawbaugh posted May 17th 2009 at 2:52PM


When considering any software upgrade it is important to check and make sure all of your other software will work on the new platform; so as expected many have been holding out on testing Windows Media Center on Windows 7 full time because of their hatred of commercials. Thanks to plug-ins like DVRMStoolBox (DTB) automatically skipping commercials in Vista has been a reality for years, but when Microsoft introduced a new SDK and recorded TV format (WTV) in Windows 7, all the old plug-ins ceased to work. Well we're happy to be the ones to tell you that we've been fortunate enough to play with early release versions of DTB and Show Analyzer -- the software that actually finds the commercials -- and they work on Windows 7 perfectly. Once again we can skip commercials without even touching the remote -- and this includes recordings that are still in progress. The bad news is that we have no idea when these updates will be available for mass consumption, but judging by how well they seem to be working, we'd expect 'em sooner rather than later.

Automatic commercial skipping is a go for Media Center in Windows 7

by Ben Drawbaugh posted Feb 9th 2009 at 6:55PM

Windows 7 Media Center
There were plenty of people upset -- including us -- when they discovered that they could no longer automatically skip commercials after upgrading their Vista Media Center with the TV Pack. Well we're very pleased to let you know that our assertion that Microsoft broke our favorite third party application on purposed, was unfounded. You see we recently got the word from the developer behind DVRMSToolBox that the Windows 7 Media Center SDK was in hand and that it won't be long before we'll be able to can skip commercials without ever picking up the remote -- nice.

Did Microsoft intentionally break commercial skipping in Media Center?

by Ben Drawbaugh posted Aug 8th 2008 at 2:11PM


When we finally got the Vista Media Center TV Pack in our hands we were so excited about the new found features, that we didn't even get around to trying our favorite plug-ins until later. But after trying our favorite commercial skipping utility, DVRMSToolBox, some of our enthusiasm died. At first we figured, oh we probably need an update, but instead of finding the latest update on the developer's site, we found this interesting post with a inconvenient work around. The wording of the post only prompted us to ask even more questions, and our friends in the beta group had a few things to say. Evidently the developer of DVRMSToolBox was in the beta as well and has been voicing his concerns to Microsoft ever since RC0 was released, and based on the comments in the beta tester's forum, we have reason to believe that Microsoft may have "broken" it on purpose. Regardless of the actual intent though, it seems that Microsoft has no intention of fixing it the SDK in a way that would once again make commercial skipping possible. And in case you're wondering, this affects all the various commercial skipping plug-ins for Media Center, not just DVRMSToolBox.




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