[Voltage]

How does this work? Do you mute commericials for a set period? I don't see how the machine can tell what are commercials and what is the rest. I only watch FOX News, so recording and playing later is of no interest to me.

[Hodar]

Your question is "how does this work"... say you have Dishnetwork's latest receiver, and you are watching TV 'live'. The O'Reily Factor comes on ... yet nature calls... so you hit your 'pause' button, and the unit use's it's internal hard drive to start 'taping' Mr. O'Reilly. You return from your nature call, with a fresh Coke .. and resume. You are now, let's say 4 minutes behind him in real time ... but haven't missed a word. You can watch at your pace, pause and back up 5 seconds if you missed what he said on some point. Now a commercial break occurrs ... so you can jump 'ahead' in time 2 minutes and thus skip the commercials. Now, you are only 2 minutes behind O'Rielly ... with the next commercial 'skip', you'll once again be back 'on time' with him. Benefits ... you got to use the restroom without missing a thing, and you got to skip over those annoying commercials.

[Michael Barnes]

Life changed when I got my TIVO. It is very nice to skip over the 3.5 minutes of commercials..When was the last time anyone watched Saturday Night Live? I managed to stomach it this past weekend; after every skit there was at least a 2.5 minute commercial block, mind you, the skits aren't anymore than 5 minutes, tops.

[thatsnotnice]

How does this work? Do you mute commericials for a set period? I don't see how the machine can tell what are commercials and what is the rest.

I don't know... I remember that a Japanese company supposedly had a VCR that would clip commercials - I guess they could detect some change in the signal... or something. Supposedly the technology exists to detect when a commercial is on, and stop taping, then re-start when it (they) are finished.

The only reason I remember it is because the advertisers and networks/stations in the U.S. made a big deal out of it at the time (mid-late 80's)... their lawyers fought tooth and nail to prevent the machines being sold in the U.S.

Still, I'd bet if you looked through some old Popular Electronics issues or similar, you could come up with somethig that you could hook into whatever you have... time waster, possibly...