Hey, Bill, nice to see you over here after 2 decades in the SageTV forum.
I have been happy with (2) features of the Channels DVR software that I couldn't get working very well in Sage:
- Remote connections. My Firesticks work extremely well remotely when I'm traveling thanks to Eric's extensive work on transcoding.
- TVEverywhere. It's nice to have all those networks aggregated into one system. Yeah, TVE is dying a slow death and we are losing channels daily, but it still works okay for what it is.
Definitely check out Comskip, it works just as well or maybe a bit better than what you remember from Sage, and you can set it as an option on the client so when a commercial shows up you can choose to skip it or just let it run.
I get some sluggish activity when fast-forwarding remotely (understandably), but never on my local network - it's always quick and smooth with the Firesticks anyway.
Kind regards