On Sun, Dec 30, 2001 at 04:00:19PM -0600, Julia Thompson wrote:

> We have one of those.  It works fairly well most of the time.
> Occasionally it doesn't read BoCB right.  On one occasion, in a B5
> episode, it thought that it detected a BoCB when there shouldn't have
> been.  That made for some fun.  :P
>
> It marks the commercial blocks after recording.  When it finishes
> recording, if it's on the timer, it automatically starts going through
> to mark the commercials.  If it's been taping with realtime input, it
> asks after you hit Stop if you want to mark the commercials now, mark
> the commercials later, or not mark them at all.  Usually we have it
> mark them right then....

I've got an RCA VCR that has this technology.

It looks for "blank" (usu. black) spaces of a frame or two separated
by a multiple of 15 sec or 30 sec (I can't remember which). It assumes
those are commercials. Sometimes it gets confused by a SF program
which has a couple dark scenes (space?) separated unfortuitously by a
commercial-sized chunk of time.

I keep mine on manual mode, so when the commercial starts, I hit the
skip commercial button. Then I can hit stop and rewind a little if it
goes too far.

It seems to get it right about 90% of the time on some programs I watch,
and only about 50% on other programs.


-- 
"Erik Reuter" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>       http://www.erikreuter.com/

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