[mythtv-users] Cheap HD media players

Brian Wood beww at beww.org
Fri Jan 15 14:13:15 UTC 2010


On Friday 15 January 2010 03:07:55 am Mark Wormgoor wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> > > I'm using the WD TV Live with no problems. Haven't figured out a good
> > > way to skip commercials, but it's great for the kids and their shows on
> > > PBS.
> >
> > Are you guys using these things as UPnP renderers, or connecting in some
> > other way? (Samba share?)?
> >
> > Unless you can run a full frontend I don't see any way to get commercial
> > skip.
> 
> The Xtreamer that I use (and probably other media players out there)
> have Myth's capability to skip forward 3 mins / 30 seconds, or skip
> backward 1 min / 10 secs. This doesn't automatically skip commercials
> (which I never had enabled on Myth either as it sometimes got it wrong
> and just skipped over some of the recording), but it means you can
> skip a commercial block in a couple of secs, which is good enough for
> me. My previous player (Buffalo Linktheater) only had fast-forward,
> which made skipping commercials a nightmare.
> 
> One way to automatically skip commercials on these devices is to have
> myth do commercial detection and then transcoding to cut it from the
> recordings, but you risk loosing parts of your recording.

So how are you connecting to the backend? UPnP? Samba? NFS?

I find commercial detection to be essentially perfect, on some networks. It 
seems to be the ones that regularly show their logo, and/or the ratings logo, 
upon return from a commercial break. On some networks, the History Channel is 
an example, I can trust the detection enough to just trust the automatically 
generated cut list, on others I have to watch and adjust the cut points 
manually, which can be tedious. Others, BBC America being an example, are less 
then 50% reliable with commercial detection.

I can accept errors that simply show me all or part of a break, but when 
actual programming is skipped it's unacceptable. BBCA seems particularly prone 
to the "bad" type of error, I usually disable commercial skip and just do it 
manually with BBCA.

The prices of media players and devices capable of running a full frontend are 
converging, and might soon meet.

The benefits of a full frontend are enough to justify the cost of a Revo, at 
least for me. It's HD-capable, very low power and looks OK for the benefit of 
people who care about such things.

I have a D-Link DSM-520, but I really miss the commercial skip capability. 
There is a huge difference between "being able" to skip through a commercial 
block manually and sitting back and letting Myth just tell me how much of my 
life I have just recovered.

The variable playback rate is also a very nice feature, especially for 
"talking heads" type programming.



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