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Comment by suzzer99 | Hacker News Reader

I'm the dinosaur that still watches most content on a DVR. The fast-forward button never fails.

Can you explain your setup a little bit. I have sling and I can record shows that are store in their cloud. however the fast forward is not exactly smooth to skip ads. most of the time Its skips a little too far ahead or too early and I end up fiddling with it going forward and backwards to be in a reasonably right spot (~5 secs before the ad finishes or after it finishes.)

1) Are there any devices available that allow recording effortlessly and then allows skipping adds equally effortlessly?

2) What are the non ad service options - Netflix, Prime Video, HBO, Youtube Premium?..what else?

I used to use MythTV. I even built a PC with a device that could pull video from a cable box. There’s an IR blaster that will change channels on the cable box, and then a little box that takes the component video from the cable box (no DRM on that) and encodes it (to MPEG-2 if I remember?)

MythTV will process the shows to flag commercial breaks, which you can then skip automatically.

MythTV looks like it’s still an active project.

I stopped using it because I just don’t watch much TV these days and I just got tired of maintaining it. Renting the DVR from Comcast is worth it to me for my meagre needs. But if you’re into TV and don’t mind some geekery, MythTV is definitely a powerful and flexible system.

I have Frontier FIOS and a physical DVR Box. Yeah you have to get really good at stopping at the right point. But I've never found a cloud FF/RW that's close to as snappy as a physical box.

I was recording TV well over 10 years ago with a Hauppauge TV Tuner card in my PC. I tried MythTV (on Linux), and Kodi and the like, but settled on MediaPortal (on Windows). I controlled the PC with a HTPC remote. I originally used MediaPortal's recording engine, but eventually switched to Argus TV, because it had smarter features (and integrated back into MediaPortal, so nothing was lost on the GUI side).

Anyway, the way most of these recording engines would work is basically that they would feed the recorded video through a "script" at the end, and so within that script you could send it to another program to find the ads. This was done with [ComSkip](https://www.team-mediaportal.com/wiki/display/MediaPortal1/C...) on MediaPortal and Argus TV. From memory, ComSkip would write a txt file or similar next to the video, and that was like a metadata file letting the playback program know where the ads were.

I'm not 100% sure how ComSkip worked internally, but there are many clues in the video stream it could use to find the ads (eg. often the static logo would disappear, or the teletext end, or the volume increase). It wasn't perfect, but it was good enough. I reckon with today's machine learning capabilities, such a program could be written to skip the ads perfectly 99% of the time. But I doubt anyone will, because even I haven't used my HTPC in this manner for over 5 years (I don't even have the TV connected to the aerial any more). Now my HTPC is just a fanless mini PC stick with Win11, a keyboard and mouse on the coffee table, and I stream through the web browser.

Try out Channels DVR [1] as your DVR server on a small server/NUC, and HDHomeRun Quattro [2] as your tuner.

It’s a great combo. ChannelsDVR Ad detection always finds just the right spot in my experience (UK, but heard the same from US friends).

One caveat with HDHomeRun is they had supply chain issues like everyone else recently so their may not be in stock or might be easier to find via Amazon etc.

1. https://getchannels.com/dvr-server/

2. https://www.silicondust.com/hdhomerun/

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