MythTV Commercial Flagging - First Impressions

I used the commercial detection feature in 0.19 last night for the first time. Why did I just try it last night, when I've been running MythTV for a while now? Well, a couple weeks ago I had to rebuild my backend after an unfortunate power loss and kernel corruption situation. I probably didn't really need to rebuild it from scratch, but I decided it was easier.

My backend is a little 400Mhz CPU, and in the previous install, I had disabled the automatic commercial flagging due to the low end CPU. In this install, I basically put on a stock MythDora installation, which has commercial flagging on by default. Last night I learned how to use it.

It's really simple really, when using a KnoppMyth frontend on my laptop, the keys are Z to skip to the next flagged break, and Q to skip to the previous one.

Well, it was not perfect. It got a couple of breaks one commercial too soon, but another tap of Z quickly brought it to the right place.

Really I was quite impressed not only by how well it flagged the commercials, but also how seemlessly MythTV was able to skip to the next flagging point. Not real delay. For a show that starts and ends each segment with a "bumper" image and music, the only way to tell Myth even was responding to my Z press was the immediate change in the audio. The transition was really that clean.

If you are not a user of the feature, I suggest you give it a try. It worked a lot better than I expected it to, and don't expect to use the 30 second skip feature much more in the future, which was my previous method of skipping commercials.

What's your experience with commercial flagging? Leave a comment below and let me know if your experience is like mine.