How does Commercial Skipping work? Does it upload the file to a server over the internet to get processed? Does it get processed locally? If locally, are there any guidelines to how much disk space and RAM are needed to process a file of a specific length? If it is processed remotely, what is the minimum required internet speed?
Commercial processing is handled locally on your DVR. It is processed by a program called Comskip. The resources it needs may vary based upon the content, but on my media server with 8GB of RAM (and no swap), memory usage rarely surpasses 2GB, and that's shared across all of the media servers running on the machine. (Of course, your results may vary.)
The way it works is that the comskip process looks for changes in the recording that indicate a commercial break (such as volume changes, video resolution, broadcaster logos, etc.). Then Channels takes that information and adds it to its recording database, so that clients are informed of where the commercial breaks are to enable skipping for playback.
Nothing is shared outside your network. Also, the software is not perfect, so do expect some cases where program content is incorrectly marked as being a commercial, as well as some commercials being missed. While it is quite good, it is not perfect. (TiVo's commercial flagging for primetime broadcasts of major networks is the hallmark for commercial flagging, but that's only because those broadcasts were manually marked up by Tivo themselves.)
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