Is there anything i can do to increase its ability to detect? it sometimes misses half or more, especially when there are larger commercial breaks.
What channels/shows are you having issues on?
well, i only have one recording since i just signed up last night when playback wasnt working, but i recorded a movie “Geronimo: An American Legend” on the “this” channel, which is an SD channel 4.3 in KC.
As far as the commercial problem initially missed, its probably that its all such low quality that you cant see the transitions. its not such a big deal. I only recorded it as a test. i recorded another show on HD and the commercials were spot on.
One thing I have noticed is that if I have some quick commercials at the beginning of a show, doubleclicking pushes me too far and I have to backup. I don’t have a problem generally with the same double click throughout the episode.
Is there anything that can be done to tweak the commercial detection? I’ve noticed lately that I’m spending more time clicking forwards more to get through the commercials because they weren’t all detected.
This happens to me all the time. Seeks like just CBS shows. That happens to be all my watches. NCIS's, Chicago Fire, MD and Police, others.
My wife is just to point she turns off comm skip or just sets it to ignore it or never clicks the button. She gets mad when she has to rewind a ton. I get it. and if you look at the commercials they are all off. Sometimes the first 20 minute of the shows do not have ads in the little purple bar but there are at least 2 there.
Commercial skipping for most all channels happens with a separate program (Comskip) that uses aspects of the recording to guess where commercials are.
The features looked for are things like sound changes (commercials sometimes have louder volumes), logo detection (the station logo that appears in the corners, or the program rating displays), tickers (running text along the bottom of the screen), blank frames (pauses of no content), and other such things.
Broadcasters are often changing how they deliver their streams to defeat these mechanisms, because their revenue depends upon serving ads. Commercial detection is not perfect, never has been, and doubtful it ever will be.
I recommend disabling automatic skipping, and even prompting, and just go with manual. It is not terribly difficult to double-press Right twice on your remote to skip to the next break, and if it overshoots, just press Left to go back in 10s increments. The same applies if a commercial appears and none were detected: press Right once to go 30s forward until you reach your content.
(The only time you get spot-on commercial detection is with TiVo and select primetime network broadcasts: they employ people to manually tag the commercial breaks.)