[mythtvnz] Commercials flagging issues

[David Moore]

On 14/01/2015, at 5:01 PM, Michael West <michael at iposs.co.nz> wrote:

> on Wednesday, 14 January 2015 2:34 p.m. Liviu Dunaev wrote:
>> Hi Everyone, 
>> 
>> I am new to MythTV and to be honest I am still to decide if I am going to stick with it. 
>> At the moment I am playing with a MythTV backend connected to one HDHomerun. 
>> I have a couple of issues, but let me start with the commercials flagging one. 
>> 
>> A few details about my configuration:
>> BE: MythTV 0.27.4 (I believe the latest stable one released) running on Ubuntu 14.04. 
>> FE: Both MythTV and XBMC running on Ubuntu 14.04.
>> 
>> Best Regards, 
>> Liviu
> 
> Hi Liviu,
> 
> With commercials that are not detected or handled I just manually skip them using the arrow keys with right being forward 30 seconds and left being back 5-10 seconds.  But I have found with MythTV frountend this works best with a faster machine and a good performing and supported graphics card like a dedicated NVIDIA GPU with VDPAU.  With a slower system it will freeze and get lots of weird graphics and sound corruption when skipping which means you have to wait sometimes between skips to know when the program starts again.  this just making skipping much more annoying in general.  With a good setup it works really well and skips forward really smoothly meaning you can skip a 4 minute commercial break in less than a second.  Many Ad breaks are the same length so you quickly learn how many times to hit the skip forward button.  The input device used also makes a big difference as some IR based systems have a lot of lag and may not recognize multiple fast pushes but wireless keyboard type devices are fast and reliable.  I've found XBMC/Kodi frountend to not handle the skipping as well MythTV but I've only tried it on different hardware so it may work ok on the right system.  The speed of the BE and the FE connection to the BE (if they are on separate machines) may have an effect on skipping performance as well because it has to buffer in the new content.
> 
> Michael
> _____________________________

I used to do this until I learned about typing a number followed by right arrow. Skips the number of minutes entered, e.g., 4 followed by right arrow to skip forward 4 minutes. Then fine tune with left or right arrow as described above.