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Comment by spullara | Hacker News Reader

ReplayTV was the TiVo before TiVo and its commercial skip was the best bar-none. I was sad when it basically died and had to get a TiVo which was a good product made by folks I knew but at the end of the day, nothing could beat ReplayTV's skip not even the secret way to turn on 30-sec skip on the TiVo. Kind of crazy how antiquated all this stuff is now.

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I felt similarly about my MythTV setup at the time. It was quite a pain to set up, having to acquire a TV decoder with hardware compression to make reasonable use of disk space without losing frames on the 400mhz boxes of the day. MySQL database, TV programming service subscription, IR remote receiver, etc.

But the commercial skipping used a set of a dozen filters for things like black screens, volume changes, logos in the corner, and bayesian analysis to nail every single commercial transition. It was flawless.

> even the secret way to turn on 30-sec skip on the TiVo

Select-Play-Select-3-0-Select ;-)

Also can't forget the ,#401 dialing prefix to enable the device to call home over the Internet using a USB Ethernet adapter instead of the phone in the early days.

TiVo's whole approach to commercials in recordings was largely informed by ReplayTV though. ReplayTV took a lot of heat and lawsuits for their automatic commercial skip functionality, which is why TiVo never implemented it and buried 30 second skip behind the code.

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