Plex’s DVR Now Auto-Removes Commercials from Your Recordings

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/05/tv-networks-say-youre-...

So, what changed?

In the 90's I had a Panasonic VCR that would automatically skipped commercials. It worked by detecting what broadcast engineers call "superblack," which is what goes over the air between recordings (say, between a TV show segment and the commercial start, then again at the end of the commercial break). It's a black generated from a lack of signal. Regular "black" like black recorded on tape is less black if you look at it on an oscilloscope, but not detectable to the average eye.

It was a great piece of technology, but had interesting social effects. After a year or so I noticed that I didn't get many of the jokes that people talked about around the water cooler at work. I was unfamiliar with certain catch phrases. I had to ask someone, "What's a macarena?"

In decades past, TV commercials were part of the collective knowledge, and a socializing factor. Think of Coca-Cola's numerous iconic ads. Or Apple's "1984." Today, with so many people streaming shows and skipping commercials on their DVRs, I wonder if that's contributing to the social fragmentation of American society.

However, between this and the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade (which was streamed to youtube, but in a super-annoying format where you had to constantly adjust the view to actually watch it), I think I might dig out my antenna and hook it back up.

With MythTV you still had the complete file and could go back and check if you were suspicious. In this case the only way to tell would be to find the file somewhere else and compare.

I've been using SageTV (which was the foundation of the Google Fiber TV DVR) for 10 years since before Google bought them an open-sourced it. Between SageTV, Netflix, and ad-blockers, my son has basically never seen a commercial.